Should You Choose Google Drive or SharePoint for Your Company?

Whether you are just starting your company or have been established for quite a few years the ability to collaborate and share information with team members is vital to every organization.  The question inevitably comes up should you use Google Drive or SharePoint?

Comparing Google Drive and SharePoint.

SharePoint is part of Microsoft’s suite of tools in Office 365.  You can access data from the desktop on your computer or from anywhere logging in from their browser.  There are additional security features in SharePoint that are paramount to protecting company data.  SharePoint has encrypted connections, and SMPT encryptions.

Google Drive is part of Google’s suite of cloud-based office solutions. You can give others access view or edit whichever documents you choose. There is not the ability to have a shared file between users.  Google Drive is tied to personal accounts.  This can be a problem if an employee is fired or leaves the company you may lose access to files, they had in their Google Drive for your organization.

When the topic of cloud collaboration and storage comes up many automatically think of Google Drive.  The fact of the matter is that both Google Drive and SharePoint are strong in their own regard.  As a business owner you will really need to evaluate your goals, the way you do business, and your team to determine which would be a better fit for you.

Microbusiness or Growing Company?

Google Drive can be a good solution for solopreneurs or for those with lifestyle businesses but as you begin to grow having layers of security around your data will become extremely important.  For a growing organization single document sharing and the last of share folders just is not productive or efficient.

SharePoint is an effective solution for small or large entities.  Securing company data is more important now than ever.  You can easily search for files, control sharing or editing, and customize as needed as your organization changes and grows over time.

As business owners we are tasked with important decisions day in and day out.  When we are first starting our organization, we can tend to make those choices based on where we are in our business at that moment or by price alone.  Those are the moments when you should take a step back and really evaluate the long-term effectiveness of those choices.  If you think too small in the beginning, you may have to budget migrating all that data elsewhere later.

As you put infrastructure into place for your organization it is important to look at where you are today and what your long-term growth and support goals are.  It is counterintuitive to put a data storage and collaboration tool into place that will hinder growth or that will simply need to be changed out later.  A better choice might be to put something into place that costs a little more now but can easily grow right along with your organization.

If you need help migrating data from Google Drive to SharePoint we can help your company manage that.