Microsoft Office has been facing a strong challenger in the name of Google Docs for quite sometime but MS Office is the reigning enterprise app suite for years and the situation hasn’t radically changed so far. Early bird advantage and resistance to change are the two factors that are paying off hefty dividend to Microsoft Office till now.
But one space, where things are appearing to drift away slowly but steadily from Microsoft’s grip isthe Academic space. Schools and colleges are one of the fastest adopters of Google Apps, thanks to Google for keeping it feature-rich and Ads-free for student fraternity.
We’re talking about ‘Google Apps for Education’. Google Apps is a popular application suite for individuals/enterprises for web based collaboration, data sharing and document sharing. It offers an MS Office alternative to end users and lets them do all the work right there on the web. ‘Google Apps for Education’ is a free suite of collaborative and communication applications, exclusively designed for Schools and Universities.
Here are some of the most prominent reasons for switching to Google Apps for Education. Take a look
1. Save money by outsourcing your infrastructure overheads to Google : Google Apps for Education takes all your IT overheads off your shoulders by providing you cloud based hosting on reliable Google servers.
2. Domain centric approach for Schools/Universities : As schools and universities are generally domain centric and prefer maintaining an email system, exclusively for that college or university, ‘Google Apps for education’ provides that facility and lets schools create domains such as abc@xyz.com where ‘abc‘ can be any student/teacher/anyone and ‘xyz‘ is the name of the school/university. This way, content, calendar, documents, presentations and other academic stuff can be limited to that domain, that is, within that college or university.
3. More web and email space: Generally, users within a self hosted domain(in case of schools and universities) get much lesser space(tens of MBs), both web and email space and therefore, feel congested as they are used to virtually unlimited sized mail accounts offered by popular mail services such as GMail, Yahoo! and Hotmail. Google Apps for Education lets schools/universities provide ample web and email space(no need to delete any mail) to every student/teacher, no matter how many.
4. Everything remains under control :Schools/Universities generally prefer spending hefty sum of money in maintaining IT infrastructure, mainly for the sake of keeping things under control. With Google Apps for Education, you can administer allowance of all ‘Google Apps for Education’ services such as Email, Calendar, Docs, Talk, Sites, Video, and Web Pages to authorized users of the school/university.
Here are some of the videos of students, teachers and authorities talking about Google Apps for Education and why does it matter to them. Take a look !