Somehow, along the way, over the years, Adaris has gotten very involved with academic customers. We currently do business with 22 of Quebec’s 48 colleges; we work with schools, school districts, colleges and universities across Canada. Despite our traditionally strong focus on Novell solutions, in recent years many have understood that Novell solutions definitely fill a gap for customers running pure Microsoft / Active Directory environments.
There’s no doubt that new trends are here, and we also need to keep up with the times. Consequently, our team has been deep-diving into the Office365 offering for several years, sharpening our skills and helping customers deploy.
In the educational realm, Google has had the upper hand for a while, most likely because “they were there first”. What I am personally seeing as I meet educational customers is that the push to Google very often comes from the pedagogical side of things: teachers want to use Google Apps with their students for collaboration (although I’m curious as to how many actually do!). However, in the past year, I am definitely getting more and more questions about Office365.
Having worked with both, I personally prefer the Office365 ecosystem (yes, I know, all the Google fans out there just lifted their eyebrows, but this is like Nikon vs. Canon, Ford trucks vs. GMC trucks, etc; it’s a quasi-religious thing and nobody is ever right! That’s why I specified “personally“). I prefer the look and feel, the integration with the desktop apps, OneNote, SharePoint, etc. So now we have a lot of academic customers who are uncertain about which direction to take: Google Apps or Office365.
There’s one point they rarely seem to think about (I say that with some confidence, because when I bring it up, they look at me and say, “Huh. We hadn’t thought of that”!): the fact that the corporate world is mostly geared towards Microsoft productivity tools, such as Outlook, Office and SharePoint. If we provide our students with a Google environment in school, isn’t it really doing them a disfavour, since they are more likely to work with Microsoft tools when they hit the workplace? Wouldn’t it make more sense to get them working with solutions that they are likely to use when they leave school and start their careers?
As I researched information about this – just to see if I was way off track! – I came across a study done by IDC on skills that employers are looking for. Now, granted, I realize the study was commissioned by Microsoft, but I would imagine it’s not too far from the truth. In the corporate world that I deal with on a daily basis, pretty much everyone is using Microsoft productivity solutions, so it’s not surprising that “Microsoft Office” comes in at a very strong second on that list.
So again, I ask…shouldn’t we be preparing our students for the workforce?
