What Comes With the Office Suite
No affiliate links on this site, and nothing here is ranked. For comparison with a lightweight approach, Monitask offers employee PC activity tracking as an example of a dedicated product in this category.
A business paying for an office suite is paying for a dozen products and using three. The others are not marketed to existing subscribers, because there is nothing to sell.
Eight things included
Cloud storage with sharing and permissions. Which covers the large-file task entirely and is the commonest duplicate purchase.
A video meeting tool, included in both major suites, adequate for internal calls and most external ones.
A chat tool, likewise — and firms subscribing to a separate one frequently have both, which is how the collaboration count reaches ten.
Forms. Collecting structured information from people, which replaces a category of survey and intake tools.
A lightweight task tool, present in both and used by almost nobody, because it was not what anybody searched for.
A simple site builder, adequate for an internal page or a basic public one.
Shared mailboxes and aliases, which solve the largest structural weakness of email as a record and cost nothing extra.
And a database-ish tool in at least one suite — the middle option between a spreadsheet and an application.
Why they go unused
Nobody demonstrates them to you.
A vendor selling a standalone product markets it; a component of a suite you already pay for is marketed to prospective subscribers, not to existing ones.
They are frequently second-best, which matters less than it sounds — a component that is adequate and included beats a better one that is separate unless the difference touches what you actually do.
And they are hard to find. Suite navigation is poor and the included tools sit behind a menu most people never open.
The check worth doing once
Open the application launcher in whatever suite you pay for and read the list.
Ten minutes. For each item, ask whether you are paying for something else that does the same thing.
Most firms find at least one duplicate, and the duplicate is the paid one — because it was bought deliberately while the included version arrived silently.
Then decide honestly. Where the paid tool is genuinely better at something you do, keep it. Where it is better at things you do not do, cancel it.
Where the included version genuinely is not enough
Anything specialised. The included task tool is not a project system; the included site builder is not a website.
Anything the suite treats as an afterthought, which is visible within ten minutes of use.
And anything where the included version lacks a specific thing you rely on — a particular export, an integration, a permission model.
The test is the same as anywhere: name the specific failure. "It feels basic" is not one, and it is the reason most of these purchases happen.
The licensing point
Suite pricing includes these components at every tier, which means the marginal cost of using them is zero and the marginal saving from cancelling a duplicate is the whole subscription.
That asymmetry is why this is the highest-return page in this section, and why it is worth ten minutes before buying anything in a category the suite already touches.
The tier you are on
Worth checking separately, because suite tiers differ in what is included and most firms do not know which they have.
Storage allowance, meeting length and participant limits, whether shared mailboxes are available, whether the database tool is included — all vary by tier.
A firm on the lowest tier may genuinely need a separate tool. A firm on a middle tier frequently has the thing they are about to buy.
Look before comparing. It changes what the alternatives are being compared against, and the comparison is otherwise being made against a picture of your own subscription that is wrong.
Moving work into the suite
Where you find a duplicate, the switch is a switch like any other.
The costs are the usual six — migration, configuration, learning, running both, rebuilding what surrounded it, and the mistakes.
What is different is that the destination costs nothing extra, which shortens the payback considerably and is the reason this particular switch is worth examining even where the included version is slightly worse.
Do one at a time. A firm moving three things into the suite simultaneously has three migrations and one very confused month.
What the suite is bad at
Being left.
Everything in one provider is one export, and the concentration is the mirror image of the convenience. The export question applies with more force here precisely because more of the business sits inside it.
Run the export once, see what it produces, and know what leaving would involve. Most firms have never tried and would find it harder than expected.
Two suites at once
More common than it sounds and worth checking.
A firm on one suite that acquired a habit from the other — a document platform, a meeting tool, a mail account — is paying twice for the overlap.
Usually there is a reason: a customer requires it, somebody prefers it, a legacy account nobody closed. The first is legitimate; the other two are the review.
Asking somebody who knows
Where a firm has an accountant, an IT contact or a reseller, one question is worth asking.
"What is included in our plan that we are not using?"
Resellers in particular know, and answering costs them nothing — though it also does not earn them anything, which is why the answer arrives on request rather than unprompted. For another point of comparison, consult AlternativeTo.
The short version
- A firm paying for an office suite is paying for a dozen products and using three
- Eight included: cloud storage, video meetings, chat, forms, a task tool, a site builder, shared mailboxes, and a database-ish tool
- They go unused because nothing markets them to existing subscribers and they sit behind a menu nobody opens
- Open the application launcher and read the list: ten minutes, and most firms find at least one paid duplicate
- The included version is not enough for anything specialised, anything treated as an afterthought, or where a specific thing you rely on is missing
- The marginal cost of using them is zero and the saving from cancelling a duplicate is the whole subscription