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Photo illustration by Aurich Lawson

Andrew Cunningham over at Ars Technica took a deep dive into cloud office alternatives and came up with the goods in the real world.

As cloud computing gains steam in the enterprise, many IT shops are looking for ways to move stuff out of their own server rooms and into someone elses. This has given rise to services like Google Apps and Office 365, which offer e-mail, calendaring, and other Web-based services that completely replace not just software running on your companys servers, but also software running on your companys desktops.

One of those software products is the venerable Microsoft Office, which is ubiquitous in most offices. In this, the first in a series of articles comparing different cloud office solutions, well be looking at productivity apps from Google, Microsoft, Zoho, and ThinkFree to compare not just their features and interfaces, but also their ability to integrate with existing systems and work with Microsoft Office documents.

Productivity software has some important considerations not necessarily found with other applications. Switching to a new cloud-based e-mail or CRM system, for example, may cause some short-term complications, but these systems are essentially isolated (or at least, they communicate with the outside world using relatively simple, well-known protocols).

Productivity software is different, thanks to Microsoft Office. Most businesses will have to be able to read Office documents, and likely produce them too. Without these interoperability constraints, most of the products here could stand on their own as productivity apps. But Office compatibility is too important to ignore.

To that end, I spent some time testing out each products Microsoft Office document converters. Its not going to be possible to track down every oddity or inaccuracy, but I wanted to get a feel for the kinds of things that each product would catch, miss, or mangle. I created and uploaded a mix of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, some that I put together myself and some that were created using templates included with Office.

Have a look at who comes out on top. And weigh in: Whats the best solution full cloud or hybrid when it comes to office suites?

Original post:
Great Office Shootout: Cloud vs. Hybrid -- Fight!