I realize the title is odd, even weird. In general, those two suites of software have been geared towards the professional and enterprise markets. So why should either of these be considered for a family? That’s an excellent question. Let me elaborate.
I use my own domain for my email address. I also like to stay away from free services, or free options, because free normally equates to terms of service which result their selling of my data. Facebook and Google are great examples of service providers that give you free services at the expense of your private data. Sure, they claim to anonymize the data, etc, but there have been enough reports of leaked documents which have demonstrated otherwise.
A family, at least mine, works very similar to a small business. Think about it. A family benefits from a shared calendar. A calendar where everyone can easily see when the next doctor’s appointment is, or when there is a school holiday, or the next vacation, or whose turn is to pick up the kid from daycare. Email and email groups are another feature that is shared. The former is obvious, everyone needs and uses email, the latter helps you to aggregate and segregate emails. For example, you can have a heath@ group for all heath related sign-ups. Or a school@ for school, banking@ for banking, etc. By signup with groups, rather than individual email addresses, everyone in the group receives the communication accordingly. Messaging is also important. This includes both, text and video messages. With messaging, you can see the value in creating groups for different subjects. Another very important feature is notes. Notes are a great way to collaborate on everyday tasks like grocery lists, things to do, upcoming travel documents, etc. Plus, you can setup notebooks for specific categories like healthcare and school, wherein each can keep scanned versions of accoding documents.
The above does not include the more business-focused products like documents, presentation, spreadsheets and a central storage drive. Kids, even as young as 8 years old, are expected to type projects, and even present. Spreadsheets are a basic utility in household budgeting and general household finances. A central store is a must have once you begin to use it. You can setup shared folders for easy sharing, and even automatic uploads of photos and videos to guard against lost devices.
The knee-jerk reaction may be “there are free options out there, why pay for them?” The answer is simple if you are a strong believer of your privacy. The second answer is control. When you pay for the service, you can have more abstract controls based on groups, and by default, your data is only accessible by members of your domain.
In this series, I plan to compare and contrast those two service providers, Zoho and GSuite. I am a current user of GSuite, but at $6 per user, per month, it can add up. At the moment I have 4 users, for a grand total of $288 per year, that is a nice chunk of change to spend on otherwise-free software. My current users include Grandma and Grandpa, wife and self. I have two young children who will need accounts soon, which will only increase my costs 50%. Then there is the consideration of a Google-centric world and my contribution to it (even if through a paid service like GSuite). If I can help it, I’d rather not contribute.
So, my plan is to compare and contrast Zoho’s offerings against my use-case with GSuite. Look at pros and cons, ease-of-use, price, consequences, and make a decision. Yes, you read consequences right. You can bet your pretty little butt Google is not going to make it easy to switch. How painful? We’ll find out. My first feature comparison will be email. Come back for the report.
