Google Drive/Office 365 alternatives

Seriously, just use Office 365. Otherwise you'll forever be dealing with a constant low grade stream of interoperability glitches.

Yes, file formats are usually interchangeable. No, that interchangeability is not perfect, especially once you get away from word processing and into spreadsheets and presentations.

The majority of people your partner has to work with outside of their charity will be using Office so these small issues will constantly cause friction and frustration.

Does your partner want to waste time on those issues or do they want to focus their energy on the good work of the charity?

And, since we're talking about a charity, O365 is probably available at a reduced price, or even free.

UK registered charities get Office 365 for free. In my experience it’s currently the best choice.

I supported all the technical aspects of a friend’s charity in their early days. Originally set them up on Zoho for cheapness before they were a fully registered charity. Zoho worked but caused plenty of pain for their less computer proficient users (volunteers and trustees). The Zoho UX is very clunky and the team required a lot of support. Migration to Office 365 made everyone very happy because of the familiarity (everyone is used to it from work). The charity requires less support time now and no longer complain about Zoho’s limitations.

Note that since 2018, Google does allow you keep your data in Europe, though not specifically in the UK:

https://support.google.com/a/answer/9223653?en

(Though this may involve upgrading to a paid business license for G Suite, if your partner is currently using the free charity tier.)

Just because of the headache involved in transferring, I'd ask her to check with legal again. It would be very unusual to require UK-based storage specifically.

If that truly is a requirement, then cloud storage is basically not an option. Just keep everything as Office documents on a local network hard drive and set up recurring backups to an off-site location (probably your partner's home).

The answer is pretty obvious - use a desktop based office suite. It's very hard for smaller players to compete with web apps like Google Apps and expect similar quality. With desktop apps you have full control. I would suggest looking into OpenOffice (or LibreOffice I guess), or simply just paying for Microsoft Office. Then you can use Office365 but download the apps and store files locally (or somewhere shared).

We recently moved our Office365 data to Uk. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/mo...

Google apps are a good alternative to Office365 but we haven't found anything that matches Excel. We're a fintech so there's no way around excel. You'll also have to deal with users who are using excel files locally.

Get a self hosted cloud like nextcloud and create accounts for each user. Nextcloud will allow you to expose directories as webdav shares which you can mount on each user's computer. Then just use desktop office suite like libre office to do all work that will be inherently saved online. Users will be able to share their documents freely between each other.

You will never the conveniences of the a paid powerhouse developed by thousands of people over the years, but for next to nothing cost and a little bit of effort you can be just as productive.

Why? O365 is free if she's a charity, look into tech-soup, which is the distributor for o365 for non profits.

Oh, GNU/emacs? Well, You can run your own OSS openoffice/sunoffice (whatever it's called nowadays) and file sharing but it's alot of work and not no maintenance.

site: https://www.techsoup.global/

> Her trustees are advising that since Google cannot guarantee that her data is being stored in the UK (apparently?), they need to migrate.

She should push back on that, since there is no legal basis for it (except in very specific circumstances).

It would be cheaper to get competent legal advice than do a shift like this for many offices.

In [next|own]cloud you can install libreoffice online and have a sheets/documents/presentation with online editing.

You'll have to check with their support about how the location is selected, but https://zoho.eu exists and I'm happy with their services.

I'd check the specific requirements though. Even DPA doesn't really require hosting in the UK, but UK or country with matching privacy requirements, which in most cases means whole EU is ok.

https://www.collaboraoffice.com/collabora-online/

not related to them, not even a user.

I've been using Kolab [0] for years for self hosting the email, calendar and tasks. There is an official integration with Seafile which gives you a "Google Drive"/"One Drive" experience (you can also integrate it with NextCloud), while recently there's been Libre Office integration available which gives you word processing, spreadsheets and presentations in your browser; I'm also using it.

The overall experience is not as smooth as with Google or MS, but I do have Exchange protocol, file storage with management and online document editing and it works.

First time it took me almost two weeks to setup everything, but I've been doing the same setup for my friends, for their small to mid sized companies for less than a week.

Their main website is not managed well but they have a pretty active development community, very useful mailing list (you can browse the archive) and somewhat dated documentation but the changes are not that hard to figure out.

Once everything is set, the update process and maintenance are almost automatic through the native linux package manager.

[0] https://www.kolab.org/

I worked IT for a small org one summer that used the Synology suite for all their internal operations. It is basically a self hosted completely OOTB clone of Google Drive, Docs, Gmail, etc I now use it personal stuff as well.

Pros:

- All the creature comforts of mainstream suites such as realtime collaboration, comments, history, etc.

- 2-way compatible with Office and Google so you can import docs to and from those suites.

- Encrypted document support

- Self hosted

Cons:

- Requires you to own a synology NAS to host it.

https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/office

https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/mailplus

https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/drive

As the user rootsudo mentioned, you might be able to use O365 for free if its a small charity.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/nonprofit/offi...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/nonprofits/eligibility

You can create an account and upload the documentation https://nonprofit.microsoft.com/en-us/getting-started

I believe charities can use G Suite for free, plus I know for sure there is a setting where you can tell them to store your data in the EU, US or no preference. However I don't believe there's a way to tell them to use the UK specifically.

Libre, apache, onlyoffice, google, microsoft and someone mentioned zoho. So many players in the market. Wonder if there's a player that can complete with the likes of office365's feature set .

https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/list/ I guess, they are in France though.

There's OpenAppStack https://openappstack.net/ . It is currently in beta but very promising.

ProtonDrive coming soon: https://protonmail.com/blog/protondrive-security/

I'm not sure if this meets all your needs around data sovereignty, but Quip is an alternative that does collaboratively-edited documents.

I'm not sure what features nextcloud has, but mailinabox.email does have it as well as email and is very easy to manage. You're going to need someone who can run the updates, but other then that I've been using it for the last 5 years and it has been VERY easy to keep running.

I'm running ours on a $10 DigitalOcean box.

Check PrivacyTools.io's recommendations.[1] Disclosure, I'm a team member there.

1. https://www.privacytools.io/software/productivity/

nextcloud with onlyoffice

Regardless of where the servers are located, I would worry about a company such as google having access to the data (that is not end to end encrypted).

Trustees are not usually experts in data protection law, so I'd ask the trustees to be providing a lot more information. At a minimum they need to explain:

1) What law they think is being broken (and they need to actually link the specific clause)

2) Why they think G Suite is breaking it (and they need to describe that breach in terms of the law they think is being broken).

3) How much they're prepared to spend on changing from G Suite to something else, including costs of migrating data, checking it's correct after migration, re-training, and any possible software and support costs.

G Suite claims it's GDPR compliant. https://cloud.google.com/security/gdpr

I recommend Zoho. Less expensive and great quality.

Heard good things about https://www.zoho.com/

Amazon WorkDocs and WorkMail

I recommend considering AirTable if the group is willing to try something new or check out:

Notes + PM -> notion.so

Word -> notion.so

PowerPoint -> slidebean.com or pitch.com

Excel/Access -> still AirTable

Outlook -> amazing email UX via hey.com for $99/year

I got many of these via alternativeto.net and producthunt.com

iCloud.