Which is better, Outlook or G Suite?

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Preston Gralla has a detailed comparison of Outlook and Gmail-Calendar-Contacts in Computerworld. He digs into many nooks and crannies and comes to th
[See the full post at: Which is better, Outlook or G Suite?]

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fk5353, Elly, GreatAndPowerfulTech

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Outlook is infinitely superior IMHO.

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Outlook 4 ever

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Outlook, the program I love to hate, has kept me chained to MS Office. If I ever come up with ways to completely duplicate the Tasks functionality, in its entirety, on Google Calendar, I will leave MS Office instantaneously and never look back. It keeps inching closer, but never quite gets there. And don’t even get me started on the difficulties keeping it synced with a phone (no we don’t use MS Exchange, a total hot mess).

The rest of Office is a bloated, overly complex mess and Libre Office does everything we need without the high price tag. Since we don’t use Teams, OneNote, or OneDrive (we use alternatives) the rest of it is a waste. Having it all tied to AD was simply the last straw.

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fk5353 wrote:

Outlook, the program I love to hate, has kept me chained to MS Office. If I ever come up with ways to completely duplicate the Tasks functionality, in its entirety, on Google Calendar, I will leave MS Office instantaneously and never look back. …

…we don’t use MS Exchange…

Hm. What do you have of Tasks functionality in Outlook but without Exchange that Google doesn’t provide?

I mean, I do get task sync through Google calendar on my phone. tablet and offline-capable desktop application… and also shared tasks between family members.

And that’s on the free accounts, not even paid G Suite.

Work is on Office 365, and plenty of the Tasks functionality would seem to rely on server-side things so…

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Thanks to your reply, I took another look at the state of Tasks in Gsuite. You are correct – my opinions are based on dated information. It does indeed handle my needs much better than it used to.

But I believe it is still missing a dedicated “dashboard” like Outlook and tasks are simply part of Calendar. This seperate dashboard makes it far easier to manage my day and make sure tasks are completed on a timely basis. I could well be wrong about this as well and will continue to investigate. Thanks for poking me on this!

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I believe Thunderbird can be configured to do that. Doesn’t do it all out of the box, but with suitable extras it will.

Google’s own approach is more of a browser-based user interface anyway and specific PC desktop applications compatibility is more of an afterthought.

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Firefox, openoffice and pages/numbers/keynote, thunderbird.  I walked away from M$ products in my personal life in 2007 after living in the deep end of desktop/server support for 10 years.  now I’m back in that world and nothing I see does anything but reinforce my opinion that M$ products are unbelievably and unnecessarily complex and fragile.  Google products are better but hanging in the background of every single G world product is the understanding that Alphabet’s mission in the universe is to know EVERYTHING about EVERYBODY so they can better “serve” you.  they say:help us do things.  I say: serve us up to the highest bidder for our demographic and usage data and actual email and online document content.  which might include our benevolent and benificient insect overlords at all the named and unnamed three letter agencies.

 

Hey look! Another Feature Update!

You mean I shouldn't click Check for Updates?

Where is the Any key?

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Chris B, fk5353, wdburt1, Fred

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Most of our staff uses Thunderbird with a GMail server. There is one person who insists on using Outlook with Exchange Server. I end up spending more hours providing tech support for email issues to that person in two months than I do everyone else (18 people) in an year.
By the way, the Computer World site with Gralla’s article won’t let me read it unless I “register.” No thank you.

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Fred

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I had to use Outlook at work (Outlook with Exchange Server), and gradually came to utterly hate it.
(1) In earlier iterations it was imperfectly compliant with SMTP standards and so email exchanged with SMTP-compliant email clients wasn’t always readable.
(2) .PST files have a practical ceiling size, above which access becomes sluggish, and then on top of that the files are easily corruptible (and you loose a bunch of messages).  You have to run SCANPST.EXE periodically to keep all your .PST files uncorrupted and compacted.
(3) Outlook prefers to store contacts from other Outlook/Exchange Server users as X.500 records instead of the usual SMTP “user@domain.name” — which means that for SMTP POP / IMAP users on the To/CC list, the SMTP email addresses of the Outlook users on that list is unavailable.
(4) If all that weren’t enough, Outlook still lacks an intuitive, well-behaved (or at least functionally documented) search feature.  GAAHHH!  I’d like to sic a honey badger on Outlook’s development team.

At home I use Mozilla Thunderbird, with calendar add-on.  I sync calendars between Google, Thunderbird, and cell phone.

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Chris B, fk5353, Norio

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I used Outlook for years in a corporate environment and just got accustomed to it.  It can do some email tasks that Gmail and Yahoo cannot do.  I still do some consulting and serve on a couple of boards of directors.  Clients and board execs still use Outlook for calendar invites though I much prefer the Google calendar as it synchs seamlessly to my phone.  When I get an Outlook invite I have to enter it into the Google calendar which is a bit of a pain.

I still maintain my Yahoo email address as I’ve used this for many years, even before Gmail was introduced.  With Outlook I can easily configure a POP3 account for Yahoo.  I do have a Gmail account because of the Android phone and tablet but hardly ever use it.  I’m on MSFT Office 2013 which works just fine for everything I do.

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For email, I escaped this conundrum by going with OE Classic, a satisfying facsimile of Outlook Express.  As for the rest of what Outlook did or does, I can do without it.

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If simplicity is your goal, choose Gmail. If, on the other hand, you and your team need every bell and whistle possible, you’ll want Outlook.

I think that’s a solid conclusion. I used to tell people the same re Outlook Express or Thuderbird v Outlook or Eudora last decade.

I didn’t move to Outlook until Office 2007, when its email finally surpassed Eudora for my needs. I never used Outlook’s other functions, as I need my calendar & to-dos as part of my desktop wallpaper—ie always visible, kicking my donkey to GTD.

I signed our small biz up to Google Apps Pro for a few years, which was ok for simple stuff—Gmail the exception, it was great & solved our horrible spam problems.

When Office 365 launched in 2011, it was immediately obvious it was in a different league of capability, so I switched us to it about 3 months after launch. By this time, Outlook.com was as good as Gmail for handling spam.

Gmail is still my main email account, with 2 others on Outlook.com & our own domain. I use Outlook [desktop program] to manage them, which it does very well aside from being an occasional [annoyance] to setup new temp accounts.

So yeah, I agree with Preston. Biz or pro use, you must go with Outlook [and 365], but Google’s stuff should be fine for personal or casual—with the exception of Gmail being pro-grade.

Lugh.
~
Alienware Aurora R6; Win10 Home x64 1803; Office 365 x32
i7-7700; GeForce GTX 1060; 16GB DDR4 2400; 1TB SSD, 256GB SSD, 4TB HD

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FL Jack, fk5353

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There’s an important difference here and seems we’re not quite all discussing the same thing here.

Are we discussing Outlook, as in the application, versus G Suite’s default user interface for groupware functions?

Or are we discussing Outlook.com, as in the server-side groupware as a service, versus Google’s G Suite groupware as a service?

Now, with G Suite, you cannot easily use the same interface with just any groupware server solution, whereas traditionally you could use Outlook (as in the application) with any number of different server solutions – back in the day, HP OpenMail on HP-UX was “the” high-end server for Outlook clients, I understand the codebase is still around as Scalix? And then there’s IBM (Lotus) Domino, SOGo, Zimbra, etc…

And that’s not getting into the servers providing just mail.

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My mom works at a non-profit and she complains to me a lot about how Outlook is a bloated, confusing, overpowered (I’ll get to that in a bit) mess. Funny that she was the one who introduced me to Gmail, all while still juggling Outlook at work, and now I’m the one who’s telling her about how G Suite might really be better.

The company she works for gets all sorts of volunteers and paid staff together. She tells me that many of them just use Google Docs and Google Drive on their personal accounts, leaving things somewhat awkwardly fragmented. She chose Office 365 because she was most familiar with Microsoft’s offerings, but even she herself says that they’re so feature-rich and so feature-packed that you need to take classes to learn them all. And chances are, 95% of people don’t need (or will ever even know of) these features.

My mom uses Gmail for her personal email account and pretty much rips her hair out when she has to use Outlook for work. I’ve taught her how to use Google Contacts to save contacts on her phone and she already knows how to use Google Calendar. So pretty much in her personal life she doesn’t use Microsoft’s stuff anymore.

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I use both. I use Outlook for myself, because i have been with it for so long (the beginning, really), that i have accumulated a long series of archived .pst files that allow me to clean out my folders every couple of years, but still have access to the past. I use Dropbox to sync the current .pst files (i separate personal from business) across machines, so i can use Outlook on my notebooks and desktop machine seamlessly.

I use Google Suite because most of the consulting companies through whom i work use it. I find it does everything we as a team require of it; i just don’t like the idea of archiving my emails in the cloud.

Outlook and Project keep me tied to Microsoft Office, for now. But i never recommend them to newbies. I always point them to Libre Office.

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