Microsoft Vs Google Workspace for Nonprofits pt 2

Which platform would you choose if you were starting a brand new nonprofit tomorrow?

Learn the differences, how to choose, and when to contemplate changing platforms in this webinar with Community IT Innovators CEO Johan Hammerstrom and Director of IT Consulting Steve Longenecker. Johan and Steve together have over 40 years of experience in nonprofit IT and have worked with hundreds of nonprofit clients as they made crucial decisions about their IT platforms.

In part 1, we discuss the basic features of each platform, and acknowledging that most people working at nonprofits do not actually have a choice in platforms, we discuss the reasons one or the other may be a better fit for your organization if you had to choose. And if you are thinking of switching, we recommend you have a very strong business case for the switch, not just personal preferences, and that you practice very good change management if you find you must switch.

In part 2, we discuss security, data retention, and the limited options for nonprofits that are not one of these two platforms. That is, there are many reputable third party options for ID management or cloud storage, but very few other options for basics like email, calendar, or the office suite of documents and spreadsheets. We then take audience questions and delve into managing a hybrid solution (and check out the previous webinar Managing Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 Together for more tips.)

Microsoft VS Google Workspace

Every nonprofit organization must have IT tools and a platform. Google offers its Google Workspace suite at a discount to nonprofit organizations. Many new nonprofits use this suite of tools to start up their organization. For small, young, and growing nonprofit organizations, and nonprofits in the education field, this inexpensive suite of user-oriented essential IT tools is becoming a popular standard.

Of course, there’s a competing service provider also offering a suite of cloud-based basic business productivity tools, also at greatly reduced prices to qualified nonprofit organizations: Microsoft.

We are often asked to give our opinion over which platform our clients should use. The answer is not as simple as you might think.

As with all our webinars, this presentation is appropriate for an audience of varied IT experience.

Community IT is proudly vendor-agnostic and our webinars cover a range of topics and discussions. Webinars are never a sales pitch, always a way to share our knowledge with our community. That said, we’re obviously talking about two specific platforms in this presentation, Microsoft and Google – and we find that 99% of our clients are using one or the other, or a hybrid of both. Given that these platforms are widely used by nonprofits, it is in that context that we discuss the choices, advantages, and trade-offs that you could be facing as you choose a platform for your nonprofit.

Many questions asked at registration or live at the virtual event will be answered in the transcript. Check back after the webinar for additional resources.

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Transcript

Carolyn Woodard: Welcome to the Community IT Innovators Technology Topics Podcast. I'm your host, Carolyn Woodard, and today we're going to hear Part 2 of our recent webinar on Microsoft 365 versus Google Workspace, choosing an IT platform for non-profits.

Johan Hammerstrom: My name is Johan Hammerstrom. I'm the CEO at Community IT.

Steve Longenecker: I'm Steve Longenecker, Director of IT Consulting.

Are There Alternatives Outside of Google Workspace and Microsoft? 
 

Carolyn Woodard: We do have a big question in the Q&A, which I just wanted to run by you. And this was, are there alternatives outside of Google and Microsoft? And the person says, my guess is there aren't many. I previously said 99% of our clients are in one or the other, but that number might actually be 100%.

Johan Hammerstrom: There are actually three different categories that it might be helpful to split these things up into. And part of the reason that we think of them as combined is because it just makes it a whole lot easier if you have identity, email, and files all in the same platform. But there are a lot of third-party file storage solutions, like Box, Ignite, Dropbox, that you could store your files in. It's more complicated to do it in a separate solution, but there are cloud-based file storage solutions that you could use.

Steve Longenecker: Sorry to interrupt, but they have worked very hard to integrate well with Microsoft 365 and Google.

Johan Hammerstrom: Yeah, exactly. 

For identity, you could use a third-party identity provider like Okta for managing your identity instead of using one of these solutions.

And then email, I think that's where it gets a little bit less. There are fewer options to do email with a third party.But there are some out there. You could host your own server, potentially. It just starts to get more complicated and difficult to start doing it yourself or in less traditional platforms than having everything in one place. 

Steve Longenecker: I'll add on the email point that email these days is such a complicated issue because it's such an old protocol. And yet, and it's also a vector for so many security compromise attempts that reputation becomes so important, which of course doesn't mean that Google and Microsoft aren't being leveraged by bad actors all the time to send out bad emails, because they are. But I think if you tried to use a much smaller third party for email, it could be that you could find something that worked really well, but I think there'd be the reputation (issue.)  

Google and Microsoft are the standard. If your email is coming from a Microsoft server or a Google server, right out of the gate it has a certain reputation that it won’t have if it's coming from your own server, certainly, but even from a third party, small third party player that does email services for hire. Those much smaller players would constantly have to worry about trying to keep their reputation and everything, as far as not having your email rejected as spam and so on. 

Johan Hammerstrom: Yeah. Part of the context for that question was particularly if some of the values of big tech seem to be misaligned with the mission of the organization. And then also potential concerns with security and privacy. 

Differences in Data Security and Privacy Between Google and Microsoft

That refers back to a comment or a question in the chat, asking if there were any differences in data security and privacy on Google and Microsoft, if you're concerned about client data security or privacy.

Steve, I'm really interested in your take on this. My thought is that both Microsoft and Google really prioritize data security and privacy. They both are very secure platforms, generally speaking, and both provide tools for managing security. 

I think Microsoft provides a much more extensive and granular set of tools for administering the platform. And that gets down to this last second-to-last bullet point here, the ease of administration. In some ways, Google is easier to administer, but there's also less that you can do in Google. So, it’s a double-edged sword. It's easier to administer Google, but it's harder to be as secure in Google as you can be in Microsoft.

Steve Longenecker: I was just Googling it. Thank you, Google. A little plug for one of our two platforms.

Because I don't know the top of my head, but I'm pretty sure that Microsoft has a bring-your-own-key, bring-your-own-encryption key. Both Microsoft and Google do an incredible job of securing your data in their clouds, better than you would ever do on your own, keeping it on your own server.  

I think the threat that people feel that you are alluding to, Johan, is the fact that for a decade, at least a decade now, the US government, I'm speaking again to this country's situation, has been able to do a secret subpoena of service providers and say, we need this data. Or even a not secret subpoena. 

The danger of a secret subpoena is, and this is done in the cases of where a court hears the subpoena and it's argued that this is done for national security reasons, and making the organization aware of the subpoena would compromise national security. And then the judge says, okay, we agree. Google or Microsoft, both will do it. We'll turn over the data to the government, and you, the organization, will never even know that your emails are now being read by government agents, because it's a secret subpoena. But even a non-secret subpoena, you can't really stop, because Google and Microsoft can give that data. 

Neither one of them likes doing this, neither one of them wants to be compelled to do it, because it's bad for business. And they actually both have good programs publicizing their situation. They're not allowed to tell, it's secret, but they are allowed to say, well, we had 14 secret subpoenas last quarter. That's all they can say, but they do say that. Their efforts at transparency are laudable, given what the legal constraints that they're under, and they will follow the law. 

And yes, is it possible that nowadays there won't even be a judge overseeing those secrets? I can't speak to that, but it does certainly seem like those people who are feeling a certain amount of concern about that kind of thing. It seems like there might be some justification. 

Anyway, that's all a long way to say I'm pretty sure Microsoft has a bring-your-own-key program, but I'm not super familiar with it, but I believe that you can set up the service so that basically Microsoft can honestly say to the government, we would turn this over to you, but all we can turn over to you is gibberish, because we don't have the encryption key. You have to go to the organization to get the encryption key, because they have it.  

The downside of that approach to things is, if you lose that key, you have lost it. There is nothing that Microsoft can do to help you. Whereas right now, if you lose all your data or you get hacked or whatever, there's a lot of things that Microsoft can do to help you. But not if you are the only keeper of the key. 

Google has that for their cloud services in general. I'm not sure if it applies to the Google Workspace platform or not. But if you look up customer supplied encryption keys, it might be interesting to look at what both Microsoft and Google have to offer in that area. 

And of course, there are third-party files in particular. We've helped clients move files into cloud services where they provide the key situations where the service provider literally can't give the data away because it's encrypted to them as well. 

Carolyn Woodard: I wanted to just jump in and say, I was just talking with someone in cybersecurity a couple of weeks ago, who also mentioned your data retention policy. The things that we've been talking about, if that is a concern for your nonprofit, look at that data retention policy and maybe tighten it up. Make sure that the data that you're storing is data that you would be okay with a subpoena calling for, and that's another way to address that topic.

Steve Longenecker: Make sure that the retention approach includes your backups.

Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Steve Longenecker: I mean, I'm just saying.

Carolyn Woodard: Exactly. If you're backing up to cloud, that is also included in that policy.

Hybrid Set Up Limitations to “Straddling” Google and Microsoft

Johan Hammerstrom: Correct me if I'm wrong, Steve, but I think as far as hybrids go, everything can be hybrid except for e-mail. 

You have to pick one platform for your e-mail, but with some caveats you can use Google Docs and have documents in SharePoint. You can use Google Meet and use Microsoft Teams. At a certain point, having both systems starts to introduce complexities that could create issues. 

But aside from e-mail, it is possible to hybridize a lot between the two systems.

Steve Longenecker: So yes, some of the nuances of that. The Desktop Suite is listed as a Microsoft 365 feature. There's really great integration between Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, the Desktop Suite applications that you can run on your computer, and the Microsoft Cloud, Microsoft 365, the SharePoint and OneDrive and so on. If you save a Microsoft Word file to Microsoft SharePoint, one of the nice integrations that happens there, well, first of all, when you click on File, Save, it wants you to save it to SharePoint. It's really easy. You're not having to fight your way somewhere else. It's just really easy. 

I call it swimming downstream, where you're in the current, you're going with the current. Swimming upstream is much more difficult, where you're doing something that Microsoft doesn't want you to do. You can do it, but you have to click three extra places, and you have to train your users to do that. 

But the other thing is that that integration allows somebody else that you're collaborating with, someone on your team, can also open that Word document up and you can both be editing the Word document at the same time. It's called co-authoring, and it's like what Google Docs has done for years, where you can see each other's cursors moving around and the editing is happening live, but you're actually doing it in Word. And if you love Word, because it's better than Google Docs as far as you're concerned, that's great.  

I do think Word is probably better if what you want to end up with is a PDF that looks nice. Word is something that you might do a report with. Johan mentioned yesterday when we were prepping for this, he does board reports for the board, and they have Power BI images in them, and graphs. And putting all that into a report that you turn into a PDF that you then give to the Board is easier if you're operating in Word, although Google Docs can do it. I think Google Docs is great at basic text editing, but when you start doing some of that stuff that almost looks more like you're publishing, Word is better. 

So that's an example of where you could use files in both, but you're going to get more advantages with the files in Microsoft 365 if they're Office Desktop Suite files.  

If you love Google Docs, it's actually your preferred editor. I don't think you can save a Google Doc to SharePoint. 

Now, what you can do is say, the finance department is going to save their files to SharePoint, and the programs people are going to save their files to Google Drive. And we have a nice bright line, and everyone knows the rules and they follow the rules. Then you can have a little bit of both.

The point about email being the exception that you can't do both is true, although even there, I helped a client recently set up Google Groups. Carolyn can chat links to some of the stuff we've talked about Google Groups in other contexts. I won't talk about it now, but it's a really cool feature of Google Workspace not available in Microsoft.

My client is a Microsoft 365 customer, but they love Google Groups. They want to use it to do their work. And what we ended up doing for them was we used a different domain name. It's still branded to them. I won't say the name of the client, but it's basically still their name, but it's a .net instead of .org. [You can't have one domain name delivering email to two different places unless you could put some rules inside Google to say forward these kinds of emails to Microsoft 365. But I would never advise that. The complexity starts to compound, and the more complexity you have, the more things can break, and the more you're constantly fixing things that have broken.]

Johan Hammerstrom: I think just a couple key things to say. If you're using Windows laptops, it’s so much easier to manage and integrate those with Microsoft 365. I'm not even sure it's possible with Google Workspace.

Steve Longenecker: It's possible, but it's just not the same.

Johan Hammerstrom: It's not the same. And so that's a hybridization that we often see, where organizations will largely be in Google Workspace, but they'll have a Microsoft 365 tenant, largely for the sake of managing their endpoints. Google Workspace does provide some endpoint management, particularly with Chromebooks. Those are popular in schools, but they've never caught on in organizations. They're not really suitable for a full day's work in a professional environment. Based on our experience, we don't really have any examples of that happening.

Steve Longenecker: Field workers, maybe, that are out interviewing program participants might use Chromebook, simple stuff.

Johan Hammerstrom: Right, right. 

AI Tools and Google Workspace or Microsoft 365

The AI tools question is an interesting one. My personal take is that we're still in the very early days of what's going to happen with AI, and there's developments on a weekly basis, it sometimes feels. 

I would not pick one of these solutions based on Co-Pilot versus Gemini. I think my prediction is that it's going to be some of these other disruptors that are coming into the tech industry that are probably going to be at the head of the pack with AI, or AI is also just going to be very behind the scenes, and developers are going to start leveraging AI tools for developing software solutions.

I would be a little bit surprised, I guess, if in three or four years from now, AI becomes a key differentiator for one of these platforms.

Q&A Microsoft 365 Vs Google Workspace
 

Carolyn Woodard: Well, are we ready to go to Q&A? We have several questions both from registration and in the Q&A. One that I thought was very insightful, maybe it's a quick answer, I don't know, is – 

Are there features in either platform that are uniquely positioned to support the activities of a nonprofit?
 

Steve Longenecker: I would say aside from price, both platforms are not oriented towards nonprofits at all, and just are just glad to be nice to the nonprofits, probably for some significant tax benefits that I'm not aware of, but I'm guessing.

I'm not thinking of a lot. I mean, I think Google Groups is pretty interesting. I think there are good cases for using that if you're a nonprofit of a certain sort. But it's not built for nonprofits at all. 

I think similarly, your communications department should almost certainly be using Google Analytics. Now, that's not even part of Google Workspace formally. It's another Google product, but you should be using it. But it's not built for nonprofits. It's built for everybody that's managing their website's traffic and trying to keep track of how well they're doing with web traffic. 

All of this stuff is well priced for nonprofits is the main thing about it.

I think it's all organized around what the commercial world needs. Don't you think, Johan?

Johan Hammerstrom: Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I don't think there's any... When I think of nonprofit-specific solutions, I think the classic example is Raiser's Edge, which is offering a service for a very specific nonprofit function, fundraising, that doesn't exist in the for-profit world. But in the grand scheme of things, that's a niche software offering, and there's no equivalent within either of these platforms, nothing that's really geared towards, focused on, or specifically built for nonprofits as a sector.

Carolyn Woodard: I don't think we totally answered this question on our perspective on a hybrid environment. Would you mind just talking for a minute or so about that? I know that we have many clients who have a hybrid environment.

Do we recommend a hybrid combination of the two platforms? Or does it just depend? 

Johan Hammerstrom: I do not recommend against it.

We've worked with organizations where they have program teams that are collaborating with other people in Google. And that's the only way. There's no way to get out of it. And for those program teams, having an organization managed Google account is definitely preferred to them using a personal Google Gmail account to do that work. And so, encouraging them to add in Google so that they can manage that data and that work, I think, is important. 

It should be clear from some of the examples that we've brought up over the course of the webinar, but it's definitely not possible to say, “Everyone gets to pick which system they want to use based on their personal preference.” 

When half of the organization is using Outlook and Teams, and the other half of the organization is using Google Meet and Gmail, that's just not really an option. 

But there are ways in which you can hybridize certain functions that these systems provide that could be of a benefit to the organization. 

Steve Longenecker: Yeah, I would say two things about it. Everything Johan said, I agree with, first of all. 

One would be that you do need to be aware that both platforms are built and organized around the assumption that you're not in a hybrid. And so you are, I use that metaphor of swimming upstream. To a certain degree, you will be swimming upstream. There's going to be some little tricks, little workflows, personal workflows, that everyone's going to have to develop. When I want to share a file, it wants to share it through email, but my email is in the other platform. I need to realize that that's not how I need to do this. I need to copy the link and then go to my email platform and then paste it in there, or whatever the thing is.

Okay, so it's not a deal breaker. I agree with Johan. I don't advise against it. You just need to be aware that the platforms are designed for everything to be integrated for everything the platform can do.  

The other thing, and now I'm just echoing what Johan said, I do think it's important if you're going to straddle, and we have a lot of clients that do, and in the audience here, basically half of our audience is doing some form of straddling, it's really helpful to have governance and bright lines about where is what is being used. And I think that's very possible, but it doesn't work to say, anybody can use whatever.

I think the example I used before was the finance department, because they are living in Excel, they get Excel, and then since Excel works really well if you save it to SharePoint, we're going to have a SharePoint library for them. But everybody else lives in Google. Well, that's a nice, clean delineation, and that should work as long as the finance people realize that when they're sharing, Microsoft might be driving them to using Outlook for e-mail and Teams for everything else. But they got to remember, no, we're saving our files to SharePoint. We're using Excel, but otherwise, we're still over here in Google workspace for e-mail and calendar and everything else. And that's not hard. That's definitely doable. 

The hybrid that we see the most, and we already said this already, is Office Desktop Suite Licensing and Windows Device Management, Windows Laptop Management in Microsoft 365, and then Google for the productivity tools.

And then where files land, usually if your e-mail is in Google, we would say go ahead and use Google for files as well, because of those integrations and swimming upstream. But you can do it either way. 

Oh, the other thing I would say is that 100 terabytes, even though I won't be surprised if in two years Microsoft's taking the limits off of SharePoint because there's just no way that they can keep the limits. Right now, their limits are on the order of one and a half to two terabytes for a very small nonprofit. That seems really small. But right now, that is kind of where things are. And so, we are seeing another sort of hybrid where everything's in Microsoft 365, except for the communications department, saves all their videos to a Google share drive. And that fits with a long tradition of the media department or the communications department having their media in a digital asset management. It's a poor person's version of a digital asset management. It's just a Google Drive. But since it has a hundred terabyte storage limit, it's great. And so, we have seen that where we have clients that are using Microsoft 365 for everything, except for their video storage. That's in this Google Drive. It is a little bit of swimming upstream because you have to remember everything else is here, but I go there for this stuff. And that's another hybrid that we see. That and the Google, the Google groups have seen a couple times switching that out.

IT Governance for Managing a Hybrid Set Up

Carolyn Woodard: Well, to give a couple final tips on managing a hybrid system, you talked about governance, which is really important. 

I think we also might say make sure that someone at your organization at an executive level owns this hybrid system because they're going to need to be checking up on the governance, and checking up on the training. That would be my other suggestion is, it's great that you have this hybrid set up, but make sure that you're doing training, you don't just do training on the first day for a new staff, but even for existing staff that you're reminding them, “Remember we store this stuff in Google Drive and this stuff in SharePoint.”

I think it makes it easier if there's somebody (at an executive level) who owns this decision that you've made to be a hybrid and then is able to check on it, make sure that people are doing the process that they need to be doing so they can be the most productive and lose the least amount of time trying to share that file in this other way, all of that sort of thing.

Cybersecurity for a Hybrid Platform Solution
 

Several people have been asking about cybersecurity. 

Next month, if you are in the DC area, we'd like to invite you to join us in person to our 2025 Nonprofit Cybersecurity Incident Report webinar. The speaker, Matt Eshelman, who's our CTO and our cybersecurity expert, is going to be there in person at our offices at 1110 Vermont Avenue Northwest, number 900. The nearest metro is McPherson Square. There's also on-site parking in the building. We'll have snacks and networking with Matt from 2.30 to 3.00, and then the webinar is going to be from 3.00 to 4:00 p.m. Eastern. So, it's a great opportunity to ask a nonprofit cybersecurity expert your questions.

If you have all these hybrid situation questions, that would be great to hit them up with those questions. If you can't make it in person, you can plan to join us on Zoom, where you'll also get a chance to ask him your questions at registration and during the webinar about the trends that he's seeing in our nonprofit clients, and how those trends can inform your security decisions and practices in 2025. So that's at 3:00 p.m. Eastern, New Pacific, Wednesday, April 23rd. You can register now for either option, in person or online at our website, communityit.com. 

There were so many great questions in chat that I know we didn't completely answer all of them. I am going to go look through those and see if we can get some of those in our transcript as well. If you want to check back in a week or so, we'll have some more answers for anything we didn't get to. 

I really want to thank everybody for being so active in the chat. There were many people who were sharing their experiences or giving advice. We really just love when our community comes together and is helping each other out to make us all a little bit smarter about all of these issues that can be so difficult. I just really want to thank you again. Thank you, Johan and Steve, for your time today, for helping us answer a lot of these questions.

And there's one more question that just came in, which is, is SharePoint being retired? I have not heard that. If it is retired, they will give us a lot of warning.

Steve Longenecker: It's entirely possible, although I haven't heard this either, but it wouldn't surprise me if it's being re-branded, given that Microsoft likes to re-brand SharePoint every 10 years, and they're about due to re-brand it again, but I haven't heard that either. I don't know. I don't think it's being retired, no.

Carolyn Woodard: All right. Well, thank you again, everyone, and have a great rest of your day.