For many years, I was a Google Suite for Education acolyte.  As a high school principal, we went “all-in” with Google – Gmail accounts for all students and staff, Google calendar for all official school activities and meetings, and we were heavy Google docs and sheets users.  We built an entire discipline referral and data system in Google sheets that logged tardies, referrals, interventions, and just about every other activity a student participated in.  If we needed to log and track data or share planning documents, Google was the tool of choice.  

When I moved from a school to the district office, I found that office life was much more entrenched with Microsoft.  Anyone who worked with numbers was on a PC using Excel, and you couldn’t schedule a meeting without Outlook.  I wasn’t very good at hiding my frustration with what felt like clunky sharing and access permissions on OneDrive when the business office shared documents.  

Perhaps the most perplexing was that the district was paying for both Google suite and Microsoft suite at the same time.  I had to regularly check both a Gmail and an Outlook account.  It seemed like an unnecessary use of limited resources to pay for both, and I not-so-secretly wished for a way to finally do away with our district office reliance on Microsoft.  Most of the tech saavy educational staff were heavily invested with Google products.  We systemtatically encouraged teachers and administrators to pursue Google Certification, and we encouraged staff to integrate Google classroom into their classroom repetoire.  

And then the pandemic hit.  All of a sudden our tech software package was our primary platform for student learning.  Overnight, our in-person classrooms and meetings were moved into teleconference mode.  Some of us who were more seasoned Google users shifted into Google’s teleconference service, Google Meet.  Many of our teachers found the administrative controls bulky and confusing, and intuitively opted for free Zoom licenses.  Of course in those early days of the pandemic there was a lot of concern about the weak safety and security features in Zoom, but it was easily the more manageable option for our staff members.  I too, admittedly, was frustrated with the quality and usability of Google Meet, and wondered why it was that Google seemed to be struggling to roll out features for group learning that other services were adopting more quickly.  We developed elaborate work arounds to communicate the right meeting codes, including setting up Googlesites where we housed pages with group meeting codes.  We struggled to embed links into Outlook invites with the appropriate sharing features.  

Then, in July, I moved to a new job, where Google was entirely absent.  The school was 100% committed to Microsoft.  I was already familiar with most of the Microsoft tools.  I’d learned to use Outlook and appreciate it’s utility – even if I still felt like it was not very fun and was hard to look at.  For the first time, I experienced Microsoft’s teleconferencing software, Teams, and that is where my mind was being changed.  Within just a few weeks, I had fallen in love with Teams and the integration of tools across the suite of Microsoft tools.  I watched teachers who seemlessly integrated student notebooks in OneNote with their Teams classes.  Our students had embedded chat features, that allowed them to stay connected with each other in a monitored school environment.  Contacts, email, chat, videoconferencing – everything seems to be talking to each other, and I felt my Microsoft resistence softening quickly.

Now, a year later, I’m a highly satisfied Microsoft suite customer.  While I still don’t think OneDrive and SharePoint are quite as easy to use as Google Drive, Microsoft has greatly improved their cloud based services.  In the case of teleconferencing software, I think Teams has been consistently ahead of Google’s products.  Outlook is, well, Outlook, and I will likely be a Gmail user until I die, but Outlook does get the job done, and their iOS app has made it easy to access and use across platforms.  In other words, it’s no longer so clear to me that schools should opt for Google over Microsoft.  At the very least, Microsoft has closed the gap, and perhaps in the pandemic, has in some ways been able to inch ahead.