After my wife spent an afternoon shoe shopping, she came home with a pair of “must have” designer shoes. “Do you like them?” she asked. “Yes,” I replied, as she pulled them out of her Nordstrom shopping bag. I cringed as I saw the price on the receipt. Why does she always have to shop at Nordstrom, I thought to myself. Can’t she find the “perfect pair” of designer shoes at a discount shoe store?

Fast forward one month and I found myself “celebrating” Mother’s Day with my wife at the mall. She was returning that same pair of designer shoes because she had decided she didn’t like them after wearing them once. There is no way Nordstrom will take these back, I thought—it has been a month and there are scuff marks on the bottom from the one time they were worn. Ten minutes later the shoes were returned and we were on our way. I now understood the value that my wife saw in shopping at Nordstrom. Yes, the shoes did cost a little more, but that is only one small part of the overall equation.

The same cost-value equation applies to purchasing a cloud-based business productivity solution. Over the last several months, I’ve heard from some IT leaders who chose Google Apps based on price alone, only to regret the decision later down the road. As one CIO put it: “Frankly, the Google value proposition is cost based, and once you take that away, what’s left?”

Before deciding between Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps, make sure you evaluate the long-term value – not just the upfront cost. Here are some factors you should consider:

• In contrast to Office 365, which offers powerful, familiar enterprise-quality features, Google Apps can be unfamiliar with oversimplified features that limit productivity.
• Unlike Google Apps, which is a one-size-fits-all solution, Office 365 lets enterprises choose the right offering level for their users.
• With Office 365, users can work offline; when back online, the updated documents are automatically synchronized. Google Apps provides only limited email access offline and no offline access to line-of-business documents.
• Office 365 comes with a financially-backed service level agreement with 99.9 percent uptime guaranteed. With Google Apps for Business, there’s no remedy for downtime unless it affects more than 5 percent of your users.
• Unlike Google Apps, which provides IT the ability to serve advertising to users, Office 365 does not offer advertising to users in anyway.
• Office 365 can be added to your existing volume license agreements, allowing you to move to the cloud with existing investments. By contrast, Google Apps requires a new set of licenses.

To help you make the right choice between Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps, check out our white paper, “Strategies for Choosing Cloud-Based Computing Solutions.” It compares the two solutions, and offers a complete list of questions you should ask. With a thorough cost-value analysis, we’re sure you’ll agree—Office 365, with its superior productivity, offers the best value for your organization.

How has your organization evaluated the cost-value of Office 365? We’d like to hear your thoughts.