This is the main category of this blog site. The G Suite category contains the majority of the blog site’s posts.
Gmail, Google Slides, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Meet and other components of G Suite are covered.
Google launched Google Workspace Essentials in May of 2020.
Essentials can be viewed as a slimmed down version of Google’s Google Workspace. It includes Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Meet, Sites, Forms and Keep. It does not host your email and it is not your users’ calendar system. Essentials does not include Google Drawings, My Maps or Jamboard.
The AI-driven meeting scheduling vendor x.ai reported in a March 18, 2020 blog post that Google Meet is being used in 24.83% of all video conference meetings scheduled using their app.
Zoom is being used in 69.13% of meetings. That means all other online meeting platforms among x.ai’s customers account for only 6.04%.
Keep in mind that Zoom meetings can be hosted by anyone, regardless of what office suite or email client they’re using. Google Meet is specific to Google Workspace.
Updated: May 22, 2020
Long before current events changed where and how many of us work, Matt Matt Mullenweg, cofounder of WordPress had developed a 100% distributed workforce at his company Automattic.
Automattic is “distributed first.” The idea of a geographically disperse workforce was a foundational one. Nearly 800 employees work in 67 different countries.
In the following video, Matt provides a number of tips for building what he calls “a distributed capability.” These include:
There are a number of cases in which you may want to remove duplicates from a list of records using Google Sheets.
For example, you may want to remove duplicate records before importing a list of leads into a CRM system such as Salesforce—or into a marketing automation system like ActiveCampaign.
Despite all of Google’s human and artificial intelligence capabilities, Sheets does not have a very sophisticated deduplication logic… yet.
The Chrome browser and Google Workspace can work together in several ways.
These connections will help you create and find documents more easily. They will save you mouse clicks.
The following tips also work for consumer Gmail accounts.
Because Google is a search company at its core, there is a collateral search benefit to users of Gmail for Business (Google Workspace) and consumer Gmail users.
That benefit is a set Gmail search operators that you can use to find specific emails anywhere within a Gmail account.
Here are some of the ways you can use these search operators to save time.
Over time, some businesses end up with a plethora of different logins to assorted Google and non-Google online properties.
This is particularly true in the digital marketing realm, where there can be dozens of online accounts that a staff marketer or a contract marketer needs to access.
Google Drive is well known as a consumer product. 1.5+ billion Gmail users each have access to 15 GB of free cloud storage on Google Drive (consumers can always buy more storage).
What many people don’t know is that Google Drive is also a business product. It is a part of Google Workspace, the business version of Gmail.
One of the key advantages that Google Docs has over the competition is that a document (or spreadsheet or presentation, etc.) can be shared for editing or commenting with any Google Workspace or consumer Gmail user outside of one’s own organization.
But what if a Google Workspace user needs to share a document with someone outside their organization who does not have a Gmail account?
The core applications of office productivity suites such as Google Workspace are: email, documents, spreadsheets and presentations. These are the basic software tools most people use at work.
In addition to these core applications, there are a number of Google Workspace extras that are included in the monthly per user price. Not everyone is aware of these bonus applications.
Many small businesses do not have the in-house resources needed to fully implement and properly manage Google Workspace. These companies often seek help from a Google Workspace Partner.
There are a lot of companies that advertise Google Workspace services, but not are all official Google partners.
In 2017, Google launched its Cloud Partner directory, which is a searchable listing of all companies that have been accepted into the Google Cloud Partner Program.
Google has introduced native Gmail Offline for business (Google Workspace) and consumer users of Gmail.
This means that Gmail users can now read, reply to and compose emails while not connected to the internet. What’s more, no Chrome extension is needed.
It also means that people who current use a local email client in conjunction with Google Workspace, mainly for offline access, may find that the local client is no longer needed.
Since Google introduced Chromebook in 2011, the adoption of Chromebooks by businesses has been more of an interesting idea than a widespread reality.
We first wrote about the business potential for Chromebooks soon after they hit the market.
Our contention was that with so many applications moving to the cloud, that many employees would no longer need a heavyweight local operating system such as Windows or macOS. Technologies such as Citrix could be used to access Windows applications from the Chrome browser.
Whether your company is a small local B2C business or a large B2C company, it’s worth paying attention to your Google My Business (GMB) listing.
According to Google, “listings on Google My Business can only be created for businesses that either have a physical location that customers can visit, or that travel to visit customers where they are.”
This means that most businesses can (and probably should) have a GMB listing. A Google My Business listing is a free source that can direct more visitors to a business’s website, almost no matter what type or size of business.
For salespeople who regularly send out long form proposals that contain pricing tables, there has always been a conundrum.
That is, a pricing table within in a document can’t be dynamically updated as easily as a spreadsheet table. The word processing capabilities within a spreadsheet are limited.
Often, a proposal’s pricing table is revised several times before the final version of a proposal is sent to the prospect or customer. This can require manual effort. Either the new bottom line in the document table needs to be hand calculated when line items are changed — or the spreadsheet table must be re-copied/pasted a into the document.
Google has released Jamboard, the first hardware component of Google Workspace.
Jamboard can be viewed as a digital whiteboard that’s sharable, in real time, across multiple locations. It has a 55-inch 4K touchscreen.
Chromebook runs on Google’s lightweight operating system, Chrome OS. Chrome OS is so lightweight that it doesn’t support running traditional locally installed business applications.
This is changing to to some degree, as several recent model Chromebooks support installed Android apps. Example models are the Acer Chromebook R 11 Convertible
and the Google Chromebook Pixel
.
Many developers will need to make changes to their Android apps in order to fully support Chrome OS. Even if an app is made compatible with Chrome OS, it may not be as robust as its Windows or macOS counterpart.
Chromebooks ship with under 32GB of local storage. But this is more than enough space to run multiple Chrome extensions.
Chrome OS updates are easy and fast to apply. This makes Chromebook an attractively secure choice in light of recent ransomware attacks, in which older unpatched operating systems were exploited.
The adoption of Google Workspace began with small to mid-sized businesses. However, the shift to Google Workspace for enterprises is ostensibly underway.
At the March 2017 Google Cloud Next Conference, both Colgate and Verizon talked about their move to Google Workspace.
Colgate-Palmolive has moved 28,000 users to Google Workspace from IBM’s legacy Notes and Domino systems. Verizon is planning to move 150,000 users to Google Workspace.
When a small business owner or manager decides to make the move from free consumer email addresses (e.g., jake2874@comcast.net) to custom email addresses (e.g., jake@abbottsolar.com), there are a number of business email options.
Aside from Microsoft, two of the most popular business email providers are Rackspace and Google.
As service providers, Google and Rackspace differ in many ways. However, they do overlap in a couple of areas.
Updated: April 25, 2019
There are more similarities between free, consumer Gmail and Google Workspace than there are differences. In fact, Google Workspace can be viewed as a multi-user version of consumer Gmail.
When a single user platform becomes multi-user, an administrative level is needed for tasks such as adding and deleting users, creating groups, assigning apps and managing security.
Fortunately, adding users to Google Workspace is a straightforward process for an admin. The creator of a Google Workspace account is a super administrator by default. One or more admin roles can optionally be assigned to any user. One of the admin roles is called User Management Admin. This role allows a user to create, delete and update individual users (other than admin users).
Only a super administrator, however, can bulk upload new users.
While Google has its own mobile phone and tablet operating system, the company needs to remain mindful of the fact that millions of consumer and business Gmail customers are iPhone and iPad users.
In fact, over the last 30 days, 63% of the mobile & tablet visitors to this website, as reported by Google Analytics, are iPhone or iPad users.
For years, Google has offered iOS apps for Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides and more. However, until recently, the Gmail app had not been updated since December 4, 2012.
Updated: January 28, 2019
New Google Sites rolled out to all Google Workspace customers in November of 2016.
The original Google Sites, now called “Classic Google Sites” was released in 2008 after the acquisition of JotSpot in 2006. The product did not see much in the way of enhancements for many years.
The new Google Sites was built from the ground up, which means not only a modern set of design components and full device responsiveness, but an app that fits in much better with the rest of the Google Workspace offerings.
The topic of email security is all too frequently in the news. On September 22, 2016, the story broke that data associated with 500 million Yahoo! email accounts had been stolen in 2014.
There are many reasons why hackers spend their time trying to infiltrate email servers and email clients. Sometimes it’s to steal intellectual property.
One of the things that has prevented some organizations from making the switch to Google Workspace is the fact that they still would need to maintain and/or purchase Microsoft Office licenses for most of their users.
However, Office licenses may only be needed for a few power users within an organization, as there are two ways that any user can open and edit Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint files using Google Drive. “Power users” can include those who work with very large Excel spreadsheets or who rely on macros within certain Excel spreadsheets. It can also include those who need to exchange redlined Word documents with third parties.
There are two ways that Google Workspace users can edit Office files without the need for Office software.
Google is a household name for internet search. Most people are aware of consumer Gmail. However, many businesspeople are not aware of Google’s suite of applications for business, Google Workspace (formerly G Suite).
“Gone Google” is a term Google coined for companies that have adopted Google Workspace. At the time of publication of this post, Google states that over 5 million companies have gone Google. With over 125 million businesses in the world, there’s clearly some upside for Google.