Microsoft O365 and Google Suite, leaders in collaborative tools.

Within the same team or on shared projects, collaborative tools have become invaluable to optimize resources, bring transparency, and lead to efficient teamwork. Whether we are talking about solutions that favor communication or facilitate task management, they must be available and fast.

Collaborative tools have thus evolved, seem simpler and more agile, but remain sensitive supports for the organization’s users. And in this market, the leaders are Microsoft O365 and Google Suite with a panel ranging from messaging to document sharing.

How well does Microsoft O365 and Google Suite perform?

Before this era of digital transformation, companies had two solutions :

• Either they hosted their own mail server,
• Either they were using a service company, an external host.

In the second approach, the SLA was a strong issue with the challenge of the availability and recovery rate announced in the service contract (SLA).

With the arrival of SaaS applications, and in particular the most well-known suites, the challenge is almost non-existent. The suppliers are very large structures, and the performance they deliver is controlled.

So is it really relevant to measure the performance of O365 or GSuite knowing their SLA approaching 99.99%? Absolutely not… but once these tools are implemented in your architecture, the performance is subject to many uncertainties. The context then changes.

How does the employee environment affect application performance?

What compromises this “pure” application performance initially delivered by Microsoft or Google is everything that the company puts between the provider and the end user: internet exits (global or local), cloud proxies (Zscaler), authentication with a new SAML provider, or even double authentication systems,…

The IS architecture has generally been in place for many years and is difficult to modify. It is a challenge to redesign and optimize the technical architecture for new Cloud Computing solutions, while maintaining service continuity.

Monitoring specific to your environment for O365 and GSuite.

The performance indicators reported by your provider or host do not take into account your technical architecture. It is therefore necessary to monitor the collaborative tools in the real environment of your company: with your accounts, from your user sites, in your proxy environment, with your SAML authentication system,… And above all, to get measurements out of it on each portion to speed up the analysis in case of problems. Having a global view shared from end to end allows us to have results on the user experience.