The German school, the International School of Stuttgart, has decided to switch completely to Microsoft services from its previous Google plan to help run administration and perform education programs with its students.
Within just three weeks the school, with the assistance of Microsoft’s FastTrack service, managed to switch 180 staff members and half the 800 students to Exchange Online and deployed Office 365 ProPlus to 400 students which they could access on a variety of devices. They also managed to migrate around 600 staff and student email accounts to Office 365 email and 400 students from Google Apps to Office 365 ProPlus.
International School of Stuttgart’s IT director, Damir Tejic, describes in a blog post that the previous system of using Microsoft Exchange Server for staff email and Google Apps and Google Mail was “old and in need of an expensive and urgent update” and that the school also had “security and privacy concerns about Google,” though he doesn’t elaborate on what those specific concerns were.
While Google Drive is used by many people, Tejic admits that the Google cloud service wasn’t a good match for the school and that it didn’t “have the flexibility for collaboration and communication” that SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Yammer, and Delve did.
FastTrack is a service provided by Microsoft for companies and organisations to help them convert their current systems to Microsoft products. It isn’t designed specifically to move customers away from Google’s revival services but there are naturally instances where a client may to choose one over the other.
Microsoft has been investing heavily in getting their services into schools recently and has added more features to its Office 365 suite of programs specifically targeted at the education sector such as Office 365 Groups.
Have you used Google or Microsoft’s services at your school or workplace? Let us know your thoughts on them in the comments below. Which one provides a better quality experience?
