When I share an email or a document with a colleague and ask for their confidentiality, I trust that they won’t share the information with others. Yet information that is particularly business- sensitive tends to be quite interesting, so we learn in the press when people are tempted to break the rules. For instance, last year Ad Age received leaked documents revealing advertising spending for Google’s largest customers. While Microsoft is not immune to leaks from personnel, it provides customers and employees with technology they can implement to guard email messages and documents from exposure beyond the intended audience. 

Information Rights Management
Information Rights Management (IRM) is similar to Digital Rights Management for documents and information. With IRM, users can restrict rights to content and prevent authorized recipients of restricted content from forwarding, copying, modifying, printing, faxing, or pasting the content. Via IRM, Windows users can even prevent restricted content from being copied with Print Screen.

Let’s take a look at controlling access to Microsoft Word documents in the image below. In Word, I can use permission rights to limit document viewing to company staff. I can set permissions which prevent recipients from forwarding, copying or printing a document, and I can restrict a document so that only full-time employees can access it. Not only that, each Office application has the ability to apply similar restrictions.

Google Docs does not have Information Rights Management. In fact, the window for leaks is wide open in a Google environment! Google Docs allows users to specify who they want to share a document with online, yet users cannot apply any security settings to the document. Other users can download and share it any way they wish. In addition, if a user is working in a Google Apps domain, their files adopt the domain’s security setting, by default, whether those settings are private or not, so Google Apps users may be sharing or publishing documents without knowing they are doing so!

Controlling Document Access with Microsoft Word versus with Google Docs

“More Security Loopholes Found in Google Docs” and “Is Google Docs Secure Enough for Your Company’s Data?”  reveal additional risks.  Since Google Docs stores images with separate URLs, the images are available to anyone who knows the URL, regardless of whether the owner has given them permission to view the image, has revoked the user’s rights to it, or has deleted the image. Knowledgeable users can even change the revision number in the URL to access older versions of the image. Should an image be sensitive, such as a graph of company budgets or losses, the information could easily become very public, damaging the firm’s reputation. However, Google reviewed these security holes stating “We believe that these concerns do not pose a significant security risk to our users.” Google doesn’t seem to take security for Google Docs images very seriously.

Managing Rights for Email
Microsoft also enables IRM for email. You can restrict access to email through Exchange via a set of permissions which are very similar to the permission settings in Office. You can identify the specific rights you want to allow or disallow. For example, to reduce risk and liability you can implement IRM so that staff can’t forward private, corporate messages outside the company without permission. Your business keeps private, team emails within the team, and company secrets contained in email remain confidential. Google has none of these capabilities.

Managing Rights with Microsoft Exchange

Information Rights Management requires certain on-premises investments. It is not for everyone. Larger organizations often take the time to implement and benefit from IRM. Should this interest you, customers can establish IRM settings for Office 2010 and Outlook 2010 using Group Policy, while SharePoint customers have the choice of managing security via a LiveID or through a Rights Management Server.

Office 365 is now localized in 21 languages and available in 42 geographies. In fact, with eight months passed since its launch, the popular cloud service is on track to become one of the fastest growing offers in Microsoft history! Learn why so many small and mid-sized organizations are choosing Office 365 over Google Apps in the white papers, Top Ten Reasons for SMBs to Choose Office 365! Two versions of the white paper are available now, a deep look into their needs for cloud tools, and a single-paged summary.

The service is certainly compelling to small businesses. -- Ninety percent of Office 365 customers are small businesses with 50 or less employees. No doubt, they want a solution that is easy to use and has capabilities that help them every day. So, what in particular drives small business customers like Santa Margarita Ford, Naturally Me, PSI Solutions, ESL Industries and D7 Consulting to choose Office 365 over Google Apps? We asked customers who selected Office 365 over Google Apps, “Why Microsoft?”, and were eager to pass on their insights.

IT pros are our behind-the-scenes heroes.They help businesses choose and implement the right solution and ensure its ongoing success. When stepping to the cloud, they need to find a secure and compliant service. Office 365 not only meets these needs, but Microsoft supports them with a robust solution that makes their jobs easier every day. With a service that they can easily manage and integrate with other business solutions, they are free to discover and create new solutions. IT professionals choosing Office 365 are strategic advisors to their organizations.

Not all services are created equal. See how different a day can be for an IT professional with Office 365, or with Google’s offering. It's a story of choice and ease with Office 365, versus limitations and frustrations with Google Apps. Take a look!

Download the infographic.

Today we hear from Thomas Rizzo, CIO at Contoso, a manufacturing firm headquartered near Seattle.

Lured by promises of “proven cost savings,” a year ago today we switched all 1,200 Contoso employees to Google Apps for Business. Finally, we’ve decided enough is enough. Yes, you’ve got that right: we’re moving back to Microsoft.

Why, you might ask? Our experience, to put it mildly, was a tad frustrating.

I quickly learned that Google Apps for Business costs much more than the listed price. Fifty dollars per user a year was just the tip of the iceberg. We still had to buy several solutions to cover web conferencing, archiving, better IT administration, and like most Google Apps users, we found ourselves using Microsoft Office to do most of our work. Next came all the IT and user training required to get our employees up to speed on Google Apps. No more lunch time office yoga for me!

After finally implementing Google Apps for Business, we worked very hard to persuade our 1,200 employees to actually use the service, giving them every incentive we could think of, from complimentary downloads of Angry Birds to free copies of Justin Bieber’s hit movie, Never Say Never.

Despite our efforts, after eight months hardly anyone had migrated. Much like employees at the District of Columbia, most continued to secretly use Exchange & Outlook, clumsily switching to Gmail whenever an IT person passed their desk.

Puzzled, we surveyed our employees to find out why. The survey revealed that Google Apps was costing our staff hours upon hours in lost productivity and real frustration. Using Gmail, for instance, many employees complained they were wasting precious time searching for specific emails. And when they opened a Word file using Google Documents, graphics disappeared while revisions and comments appeared jumbled together as plain text. Some tore their hair out; others began to call in sick.

For the 10 people in our workforce who are visually impaired, productivity was even a bigger challenge. Since Google Apps wasn’t compatible with their screen readers, they weren’t able to get any work done at all. Frustrated and confused, many of our employees turned to knitting to drown their sorrows, decreasing their productivity even further.

Hoping for help, we reached out to Google’s recently implemented 24 x 7 phone support. The support person was friendly, yet never deviated from her script. I spent lots of time on the phone answering her endless questions. When the grilling was finally over, she bumped up the call to a ‘real’ expert who told me a fix didn’t exist. That’s when the real problem finally occurred to me: Google Apps for Business just isn’t a priority next to advertisements, consumer products, and new products like Google+.

The next week, Google Apps went down in our finance division, leaving 58 people unable to work. When we called Google, we were told that 58 people with no service did not qualify as downtime. By their definition, the system was not truly down unless more than 5 percent of users were affected. They were sorry, but to receive a service credit, 61 employees needed to be without service, not just 58. As a result, the finance division issued employee paychecks three days late, creating a near mutiny.

A couple of months later, we noticed our profits had begun to fall. Upon further investigation, we discovered that one of our top competitors had started to produce the same signature widget that we do – for a dollar less. We had no idea how they had figured out our secret. We later learned that because Google doesn’t support Information Rights Management, email message recipients can easily edit, forward, or print sensitive information. One of our employees had leaked out our secret without us knowing it!

We also realized we weren’t closing as much business as usual. When we talked to our resellers, they told us they weren’t able to insert images uploaded to Google Docs into their Google Presentations. Without any images, our sales presentations were boring, with prospective customers visibly fidgeting in their seats. Even worse, many of our salespeople were missing customer meetings. Why? Because with Google Calendar, they weren’t getting any email reminders.

Last month, things came to a head. The Contoso workforce occupied the IT department offices chanting, “Enough is enough.” When some of the management team approached, they pelted us with pies. Reluctantly we brought out the riot gear, tasers and pepper spray, to get them to retreat. When we finally sat down at the negotiating table, we learned that the Contoso workforce had only one demand – that we abandon Google Apps and return to Microsoft.

At that moment, I realized they were right. Enough is enough. There’s a reason why 750 million users count on Microsoft Office for business productivity – because it works!

My advice to you: Don’t be fooled by Google.

To get your point across, style matters. Making your point takes flair and sometimes some swagger, and you always need substance. So, your message needs to be complete and your document’s format needs to be what you intended. Of course, you want to have all of the pieces in your message, including your charts and your images. And you want to have the right look and feel. I like to call this the “fidelity” of the document.

Meet our man in this video. He put his heart and soul into preparing for his proposal. You can imagine his frustration when it doesn't turn out exactly as he intended.

Don’t lose your mojo by using Google Docs to share documents. Share your information and ideas with Office Web Apps.

I've shared Office documents with Google Docs, and here’s what can happen:

• Critical information in Excel spreadsheet cells disappear. My budget formulas display "ERROR!", and I look like I find second-grade math challenging.
• The newsletter I’m pulling together loses its charts, so I’m only updating people with half of the information that parents in the school district care about.
• Images are lost on  invitations, leaving friends feeling ‘flat’ about the party that we know will be the best Daytona 500 event we’ve ever had!
• Turning to my work at the office on a document, tracked changes disappear and the ‘Comments’ are not tied to the sources. The message doesn’t flow, to say the least. My focus and influence are questionable… Uggh.
• I’m updating my bio, getting ready to present at an event. Formatting including tabs, paragraph spacing and page margins move around and some drop off. I look ridiculously unprofessional, and I’ve lost the emphasis and style I’ve just labored over.
• Next, I finalize the presentation. My PowerPoint fonts are changed, and animations and transitions are missing. At the event, I lose the attention of customers in delivering it.

In short, the people you communicate with can get the wrong message, because Google Docs often doesn’t deliver your Office documents the way you created them on the desktop –They can get lost in translation, become incomplete, and certainly lack the sizzle.

With Office Web Apps I create, access, edit and share Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote documents using either Windows Live SkyDrive, or SharePoint. Show me, you say? Take a look at the differences between using Office Web Apps and Google Docs.

Your mojo and your style matter. Viisit our Office Facebook page. You can post, share, and learn more about the differences people find in using Office Web Apps versus Google Docs.

If you’re ready to get your feet wet with cloud computing, you can try SkyDrive. -- It’s free!