Anyone have advanced knowledge on Google Suite and/or Microsoft Teams for Businesses? (1 Viewer)

Long story short, my employer is switching some of our staff from Google Suite to Microsoft Teams. Those staff members will be required to use both. They are saying it’s due to HIPAA and FERPA guidelines. Something seems fishy about this and when I’ve inquired for more info on why, it seems like nobody wants to explain it. I would just like to pick someone’s brain. So if anyone has knowledge with their pricing, configuration, etc that would be super helpful. I realize it’s kind of a niche topic but it’s worth a shot.

Teams pricing depends if your employer is already paying for Office.  It would probably be included in that.  

Thorpe said:

Teams pricing depends if your employer is already paying for Office.  It would probably be included in that.  

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Thanks. We were and still are paying for the Google Suite. When Teams was added, we also got the file Adobe suite so not sure if that is at all connected. To call that overkill for teachers is an understatement. Nobody here is going graphics at that level. Not sure what they are paying for thousands of teachers to have that but I has to be a lot.

Teams sucks, it lags too often. Microsoft wasn't ready to go big time with it, but they did anyway. At times it uses 100% of my CPU.

I think there is a free version of Teams with limitations on length of meeting and number of particpants.

But if you are education, then I have no idea what they charge - I'd say it is probably free - could be a trial basis.

LoadLetterPaper said:

Teams sucks, it lags too often. Microsoft wasn't ready to go big time with it, but they did anyway. At times it uses 100% of my CPU.

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They were not ready and did push things quickly once the pandemic hit, but they have a great vision for the tool and honestly I've gotten to the point where I love it.  It is a resource hog so they do need to work on that.

LoadLetterPaper said:

Teams sucks, it lags too often. Microsoft wasn't ready to go big time with it, but they did anyway. At times it uses 100% of my CPU.

Click to expand...

AAABatteries said:

They were not ready and did push things quickly once the pandemic hit, but they have a great vision for the tool and honestly I've gotten to the point where I love it.  It is a resource hog so they do need to work on that.

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So far it’s worked ok but I have noticed everything else lagging when it’s running. 

Ilov80s said:

So far it’s worked ok but I have noticed everything else lagging when it’s running. 

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I spend literally all my day using it.  4-6 hours of meetings per day in it, chats all day long, and the Teams themselves.  But it's a resource hog.  It slows me down at times while I wait for it to catch up.

LoadLetterPaper said:

Teams sucks, it lags too often. Microsoft wasn't ready to go big time with it, but they did anyway. At times it uses 100% of my CPU.

Click to expand...

 

Our company has been 100% Teams for Phone calls/meetings/IM etc. for the last 18 months with very little issues.

Really, the only time I see issues are..

#1 - Sometimes Video on causes delays - But we've had meetings where 10+ had their Video on with very little issues.. and this is with all of us working from home right now.

#2 - We use Global Protect for VPN connection.. I have found that if I have connected to GP and tried to share video/Screens there has been lag.. But I drop VPN and everything is back to being smooth.

I help support the Teams environment, as well as spend a lot of my time creating Power Apps and Power Automate, as well as using AI Builder to build out Invoice processing which is a resource hog in itself, and have very little lag..

My employer uses both. I think both have pluses/minuses. I'm a tax lawyer and work on a lot of lengthy tax opinions. I find Teams better for that when having multiple review at the same time, because in the Microsoft language.  As well as if working on a Powerpoint deck or Excel for similar reasons.  Not as real-time to see updates as in Google, but works fine for it (formatting still not perfect in Teams though). I find Google Docs runs really slow when the document gets too long.  But, if working on a short document, I do think Google docs is better for that. I also think the tagging function works better in Google than Teams.

Some people have strong preferences on calls through Google Meet or Teams, but I don't really have one.  And I mostly still use Google Chat.  I sometimes work off iPad, and I like Google's mobile apps (e.g., mobile notifications when I get a chat message), so appreciate that aspect.

No issues with Teams. We were having WebEx issues, then Zoom was outlawed by CIO/CISO. So Teams it is.