Printer-friendly versionEmail

In this corner, we have the heavyweights: traditional office software like Microsoft Office or OpenOffice.org. These nearly ubiquitous desktop tools provide feature-rich, popular ways to support word processing and spreadsheets and to create and share presentations.

In the other corner, we have the upstart contenders. Over the last few years, online office software like Google, Zoho, and ThinkFree have matured into reliable tools to create, manage, and collaborate on these same types of office documents — all on the Web. Instead of installing software, these tools let you access and edit your files online.

Which category is right for you in this office suite match-up? You may find that one is particularly suited to your organization, or it might make sense to use a combination of both. In this article, we consider the overall benefits and downsides of each type of office software and the situations in which each of them shines.

Features and Interface

Microsoft’s Office interface is familiar to many, and the company has developed a huge set of advanced features over the years. The same is true of OpenOffice.org, as it follows most of the same interface conventions as Microsoft. Organizations that use these applications’ advanced features will find them hard to replace: While the online suites work fine for standard reports, memos, spreadsheets, and presentations, they don't offer all the sophisticated features of these established tools. Many of the features sophisticated users rely on heavily — especially those in print-heavy work environments — will be difficult or impossible to find online. Things like mail merge, detailed control over fonts, easy formatting of presentation handouts, or very sophisticated spreadsheet formulas may well be missing in the online suites.

That said, the simplicity of Google’s tools in particular may appeal to users with straightforward needs. Because Google offers fewer features, the interface is considerably simpler, and those who have never tried any office software may find it easier to use. Zoho provides a useful set of features in an interface akin to, but different than, Office. ThinkFree’s interface, meanwhile, is nearly identical to Microsoft Office’s, with an impressive range of functionality, but doesn’t provide all the advanced functionality of Microsoft Office. (For instance, ThinkFree’s Write application can’t track changes like Microsoft Word.)

Almost all of the online suites offer the ability to import an existing document into a trial interface for free. If you're not sure a suite can do everything that's important to you, upload your Microsoft Office document and try out the editing features.

Cost

If you’re buying the Microsoft Office suite at retail rates, cost becomes a huge consideration. Nonprofits don’t need to — TechSoup makes it available for about $20 per computer to qualifying organizations. That means it’s within the same ballpark as many of the other online tools. Google’s office tools and OpenOffice.org are free, while ThinkFree costs $20 per user per year. Zoho Business, which is the office tool suite version, is free for up to 10 users, and $50 per user per year beyond that. (Ask about an additional nonprofit discount.)

Office software is critical to effective operations. At these small differences in price — perhaps $240 per year at most for a 10-person organization — you should prioritize how well the software meets your needs over whether it helps you save a few dollars.

Collaboration

The way in which you share and collaborate on files varies considerably between the online and offline models. Traditionally, with Microsoft Office or OpenOffice.org you send the file via email to the people you want to share it with, or save it on a network file server so others in your office have access to it. They open it in their version of the software, edit it, potentially track their changes, and send it back to you. The functionality to carefully view and incorporate changes can be very useful for those who want to be able to easily see what’s changed and approve it before it is added.

Web-based applications provide an easier way to share these traditional files. For instance, Microsoft now offers Office Live Workspace, which provides free, shared, online spaces where your team can post and share documents without the need to email files around. The functionality lets editors “check out” and “check in” files to prevent multiple people from making different offline changes at the same time. Other Web-based tools offer similar functionality.

However, Google, Zoho, and ThinkFree have considerably more robust built-in online collaboration features. All three let your team edit the same files and see other people’s changes at the same time. This is very useful when collaborating on the same document: Everyone can update the file in one location, which greatly simplifies version control, compared to having multiple versions of the file. The software tracks all revisions over time, but the changes aren’t always shown within the document itself, as per Microsoft Word’s Track Changes features – instead, the changes are shown in a separate revision history in some of the tools.

It's easy to give internal staff members or other regular users of the tool access to your files. Each of the collaborators will need to register for the software in order to edit the files, however, which can be a barrier for casual reviewers. All three tools offer free versions, so at least one-time collaborators don’t need to pay. And you can always save your document into a more familiar Office file if you prefer to email it around.

File Storage and Backup

When you use traditional, installed office software, you store all your files locally — either on a hard drive on your own computer or on a network file server. You need to back up those files yourself, or you run the risk of losing them all if something happens to your computer.

With the online software, you use a Web-based tool to manage and organize your files. The file-management interfaces vary: While some offer useful functionality, like the ability to tag files with keywords, they also add another layer of complexity for your users to learn and understand. However, they all back up your files for you, with their own offsite server farms, making it less likely that you’ll lose them due to a computer problem or an office catastrophe.

Access and Performance

Online office software is available anywhere you have an Internet browser, which can be a big advantage. If your staff uses a PC at work and a Mac at home, or needs to access information while on vacation, you don’t need to worry about whether or not they have the right tools. To compare, you need a separate license of Microsoft Office for every computer on which you want to use it, and each is specific to a particular operating system.

However, online tools are dependent on the speed and reliability of your Internet connection. While all of the online office tools have the ability to pull files down to your computer and work on them offline, they’re designed with the expectation that you’ll do most of your work right in the Web interface. If you have a slow or intermittent connection to the Internet, the online tools (particularly the more complex Zoho and ThinkFree interfaces) may be annoyingly slow to use.

You're also dependent on the online vendor to keep the tools up and running — if they go down, there's usually nothing you can do but wait for service to be restored. Unless you have a large IT team, there's no reason to suspect that your own network and desktop will be more reliable than the typically very reliable online applications provided by a large vendor, but it's certainly worth checking into the reliability of lesser-known vendors.

Security and Privacy

Both online and offline office suites are generally secure. The files created by traditional installed software are as secure as your computer — with a solid firewall in place and password protection for your computer, they’re likely to be safe from all but a concerted attack. The same is true for an online office suite. As the online software and all your files are password protected, they’ll be private (unless you choose otherwise) and protected from prying eyes. Any truly sensitive data, however— such as credit card data, medical information, or critical organizational secrets — merits additional security. This type of information shouldn’t be stored using online files, and you’ll need to take substantial extra steps to secure them — even on your desktop.

Google, Zoho, and ThinkFree all have reasonable privacy policies, and certainly aren’t going to change or sell your files. However, they do have your data, and it’s important to be clear on the details of what they might do with it. For instance, Google specifically creates a vast data store from their hosted applications that allows them to understand and track Internet activity. Does that hurt you? Not directly, but some people find the large amount of data Google collects to be unsettling, and are concerned as to what they might do with it in the future. Depending on your mission and your comfort level, you might opt to use only vendors who pledge, in writing, not to use your data in any way.

Upgrades and Maintenance

Last but not least, consider what you’ll need to do in order to make sure your staff has up-to-date software. The online tools offer a big advantage in this area — all users automatically get any feature upgrades to the software, and you won’t have to do much of anything to keep your team up and running. Upgrades are generally incremental, so as to not require much new training for your users.

If you’re using traditional installed office suites, you’ll want to make sure you have an upgrade and maintenance plan. It’s important that users receive the relatively frequent incremental releases, as they may patch security holes. That used to mean a labor-intensive process if you have multiple users, but these days, most installed office applications update themselves over the Web. It may be more of process to move your office from one version of the software to another. For instance, when Microsoft released Office 2007, with both a new interface and new file format, organizations had a hard decision to make about whether to move to the new version and retrain their staff, or stay with the old version and have more difficulty reading the files created by organizations that had adopted the newer versions.

Choosing for Your Organization

Online office software isn’t likely to score a knock-out blow to traditional installed office software any time soon. In fact, it’s unlikely to make sense to switch an office full of happy Microsoft Office users completely over to an online office suite, given Microsoft's affordable nonprofit pricing. For very small or new organizations, though, the collaboration features and lack of maintenance of an online suite can be compelling.

In fact, the collaboration features can be useful to many. A number of organizations rely on Microsoft Office for their day-to-day work, but use one of the online tools for documents that require a lot of input from a number of different people. For instance, here at Idealware, we use Microsoft Office for internal work, but use Google Docs to let reviewers easily see and add their input to all our articles — including the team working on this article!

At the end of the day, the match-up of online versus traditional office software may not really be a prizefight. Rather, for many organizations, the two contenders can live together in harmony.

For More Information

The Truth About Hosted Software Packages

Idealware’s higher-level look at the general pros and cons of hosted versus installed software.

Online Office Apps Get Real: Google Docs vs. ThinkFree vs. Zoho
ComputerWorld’s reasonably detailed and useful comparison of the three online programs.