Business users name their favorite features of Office 365 and Google Apps

2015 was a momentous year for cloud computing, with businesses rushing to ditch old-fashioned software for cloud versions.

And that means the war between Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365 really heated up.

Until mid-way through this year, Google had been leading this market, thanks to is popularity with startups and smaller companies. But then Office 365's usage skyrocketed, thanks to Microsoft's internal sales push for cloud computing and the fact that its big enterprise customers were ready to give it a try.

So we wondered what each set of users thought was the killer feature of their online Office software.

With the help of BetterCloud, a company that provides IT management and security services to both Google Apps and Office 365 customers, we got to find out. BetterCloud surveyed 500 IT manager customers, half of them Google customers and the other half Microsoft.

We found out that for Google Apps for Work users, Google Drive is the killer feature. Drive lets you store documents, share them and allows multiple co-workers to work on the same document at the same time (you can watch your co-workers typing). A whopping 74% of Google Apps customers said their organization couldn't live without Google Drive.

Not very many Office 365 customers people cared about Microsoft's similar online storage service, OneDrive. Only 18% said their organization couldn't live without OneDrive.

They loved Outlook Calendar the most, which replicates many of the offline version of Outlook's fancy calendar functions. Some 50% of the IT folks polled named it as the feature their company couldn't live without.

Interestingly, Office 365 users hardly gave a thought to Yammer, the Slack competitor/email alternative that Microsoft bought in 2012 for $1.2 billion.

Ditto for Google+, Google's social network.

Here's the full response:

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