Office Live vs. Google Docs

The first thing that stands out when you log in to both services is the fact that Microsofts login page features a small advertisement. This is a good thing because users can hope that the service will stay free. Office Live features templates or blank “workspaces”, Google Docs has the folders. Microsoft’s service lets you upload any kind of file up to 25mb of size while Google limits its service to html, txt, doc, rtf, odt, xls, ods, tsv, tsb, ppt and pps. It misses the highly spread pdfs as well as pictures. Furthermore, the maximum file size allowed is 500kb or 10mb for presentations.

While sharing is available in both services, Office Live distinguishes between two different roles, editor and viewer. Versioning is supported by both.

Mobile access is available for Google’s solution while Office Live features comments and an activity overview.

IT (un-)enabled Group Projects

Four subjects – three group projects. A nightmare for most of the students, including me. Countless meetings, even more mails and a million different documents containing the work of several people. As a Business and IT student I am lucky to have some insight into solutions that make life easier, but unfortunately most of my fellow students (especially the business ones) use a laptop and Office 2003. That’s it. Versioning is a nightmare and real IT enabled collaboration is just not existing. I tried to foster the use of Office Live where groups and work together online – the perfect solution and it’s free (for now). But most people say we don’t need that and that it’s too complicated. Bull*?$!. It’s so easy and it safes time because you don’t have to meet every other day and follow up with countless emails. Especially as a student no matter what your major is, you should know and use the new solutions for collaboration. Everyone’s using Facebook, hardly anyone uses Google Docs or Microsoft’s Office Live.