Office 365 vs. Google Apps vs. Zoho

Versioning

Googe Apps: You can easily access revision history from the File menu in Google Docs.

Office 365: Office 365 has a check-out/in system for document control, but I haven’t found a way to view revision history through the online client.

Zoho: You can access revision history through “History” button on the Review tab. It can highlight the differences between different versions of the document.

Mobile Access

Google Apps: Google Apps supports document editing on the iPhone and on Android devices running Android 2.2 and up. It supports document viewing on several other devices. Third-party apps like Quickoffice can provide offline access and editing as well.

Google Sync provides access to calendar, contacts and other features on Android, iPhone and BlackBerry. Google Apps e-mail should work on any phone with an IMAP client.

Office 365: Support for mobile devices is limited. See this InfoWorld article for details. Long story short: you can view but not edit documents on most platforms (I had more luck than the author of that post with editing Excel spreadsheets from Internet Explorer. See Above).

For e-mail and other Outlook features, Exchange clients on any platform should work.

Zoho: Zoho has a mobile optimized site that lets users view documents, but not edit them. There’s also a native app for iOS, but it doesn’t allow editing either. Any IMAP enabled client should work for e-mail.

Offline Access

Goolge Apps: Using Google Cloud Connect or other third-party apps you can save and sync local copies of your Google Docs. This definitely isn’t Google’s strong point, however. Google promises HTML5-based offline editing in the future.

Office 365: On the other hand, offline truly is Microsoft’s strong point. Microsoft offers the ability to sync your on-premises SharePoint and Exchange installations with an Office 365 installation.

Zoho: Zoho used to offer offline access via Google Gears before Google discontinued Gear. Zoho is moving towards HTML5 for offline access.

Users of Nomadesk, a cloud file synchronization service (like Dropbox or Box) can edit and save files using Zoho. But you’ll have to move your Zoho files manually into Nomadesk, and pay a separate fee to Nomadesk.

Advanced features

Google Apps: Google Apps Spreadsheet has a feature that lets users create forms that can be shared via e-mail to collect data. It’s proven to be a popular “power user” feature.

It also supports creating charts from the browser, something that is still not support in Office 365. As noted above, 365 is mostly designed to be used as an hosted version of Exchange Server, SharePoint Server and Lync Server – not as an browser-based version of Office. So you’ll still need to deploy desktop copies of Office to your employees do all but the most basic tasks.

This might be a reasonable strategy – Google Docs remains unable to match Office’s feature set. But it continues to add improvements, such as pivot tables (which were already available in Zoho). Both Zoho and Google offer far more functionality in-browser than 365 does, so if the point of having a cloud-hosted solution is to have a truly fully featured set office tools, then these two companies are much closer to that than Microsoft.

Conclusion

Google Apps still provides the best experience for editing in real-time. Google Apps and Zoho both trump Office 365 at in-browser editing. But 365 is clear winner in offline access and advanced editing (if you have a new enough desktop version of desktop Office).

We didn’t dive into Lync’s unified communications features, which may be worth a look in the future. And the differences between Exchange and Google Apps e-mail were beyond the scope of this article (short version: Google’s way easier to setup, but Exchange is way more advanced).

Other Options

Google Apps, Microsoft Office 365 and Zoho are by no means the only cloud-based office suite. Others include:

• Adobe Acrobat.com
• Box
• Crocodoc
• ThinkFree
• Cisco WebEx WebOffice
• Zimbra (now owned by VMware)

Discuss

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