Updated: April 25, 2019
Google has made significant inroads into the small business market with Google Workspace. For business owners and employees who have been using consumer Gmail, moving to Google Workspace is an easy transition.
However, Google has faced several barriers to widespread Google Workspace enterprise adoption. Here are some of those blockers and what Google has been doing to address them.
For anyone who is in sales and who uses either Google Workspace or Gmail, there’s a new sales productivity platform from Cirrus Insight that’s worth taking on a test drive.
Cirrus Insight’s flagship product was a Chrome extension for Gmail to Salesforce integration. Recently, the company expanded its offering to become a a broad and useful feature set for any user of Gmail or Google Workspace — regardless of whether they are using a specific CRM application.
Through a combination of internal inventions and acquisitions, Cirrus has assembled a “dream suite” of tools that most salespeople will appreciate.
Here is an overview of a few of the ways that salespeople can benefit from the Cirrus platform.
Updated: October 15, 2020
Gmail is the second most popular email client in the world after the iPhone email client. Gmail has over 1.5 billion users.
Some small businesses use the free, consumer version of Gmail for their business communications. Other organizations make the move to Google Workspace, which includes Gmail for Business.
FeedBurner is a web feed tool that was launched in 2004. The best know web feed format is RSS (Really Simple Syndication).
FeedBurner was acquired by Google in June of 2007.
Several years later, Google’s inattention to FeedBurner made it clear that FeedBurner did not have any direct or even indirect monetization potential.
Because of Google’s lack of attention to the app, bloggers began to predict its demise.
The GOOGLEFINANCE function is part of Google Sheets. Google Sheets is available in both consumer Gmail and organization-wide Google Workspace. The function allows users to create trend charts and comparisons for any assets that have a valid Google Finance ticker symbol.
Here are several examples of how the GOOGLEFINANCE function can be used in Google Sheets to compare the performance of stocks and indexes against one another.
Below are several California wine country maps that we created in Google My Maps. Included wine country maps are: Napa Valley; Sonoma Valley; Alexander Valley; Lodi; and Paso Robles.
Google My Maps is available to both users of consumer Gmail accounts and to Google Workspace users.
Google My Maps allows for mass importing winery locations from a spreadsheet. My Maps also allows for manually adding each winery.
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.
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.
Updated: October 7, 2020
The current Google Workspace pricing is different than it was when Google Workspace was known as G Suite.
Prior to December 6, 2012, Google offered a free business version of Google Apps. Businesses that signed up for that version are grandfathered at no cost for up to 10 users.
Google still offers free versions of Google Workspace to qualified educational and government institutions as well as to qualified nonprofit organizations.
For for-profit businesses, Google Workspace does come at a cost.
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.
Google Sheets is one of the productivity applications that’s included with free consumer Gmail and with Google Workspace [for business].
It is a cloud based spreadsheet application. No desktop software is needed to create and edit spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are stored in the cloud, on a virtual drive called Google Drive.
Google Sheets can be used for everything from basic calculations to sophisticated data analysis.
Google Docs is one of the productivity applications that’s included with free consumer Gmail and with Google Workspace (for business).
Google Docs is a cloud-based word processor, which means that no desktop software is required to create and edit documents. Documents are stored on Google Drive, which is the cloud drive included with Gmail and Google Workspace.
Google Docs has all the core capabilities that can be found in traditional word processors. It also has a number of capabilities that relate to the fact that the documents are stored on a cloud drive (vs. on one person’s desktop). So, how does Google Docs work? Here are just a few of the capabilities.
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.
There are two ways in which a Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) user can have an unlimited number of inbound email addresses associated with their Google Workspace account. We’ll refer to these ways as “dimensions”, as they can be used in combination.
The first dimension of unlimited email addresses are email aliases. Aliases are assigned to a user account by a Google Workspace admin. An admin can assign multiple values to what is technically called the Local-part of the email address, or the part before the @ sign.
In the following example, you will see that Lou’s default email address is lou@yourcrmdemo.com. Lou must use this address to login to her email account.
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 Analytics Event tracking allows you to incorporate visitor activity from many different sources within Google Analytics.
Once the information is in Google Analytics, as we covered in the previous post, comparative visualizations can be created in Google Sheets.
Here are five Google Analytics event tracking examples. You can use these to measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. This is all predicated on the fact that you are using the Universal Analytics tracking code.
One of many benefits to using Google Workspace is that Google Workspace users with access to their organization’s Google Analytics account can easily share specific slices of Google Analytics data with their co-workers.
The Google Analytics Add-on for Google Sheets lets a Sheets user who has a Google Analytics login create a variety of comparative visualizations within Google Sheets.
Google Slides allows two or more people to collaborate in real-time on edits to an online presentation.
For this to happen, a Google Slides presentation creator needs to first share out his or her presentation with one or more people.
Google Workspace users can present real time data in Google Slides.
Until Google introduced this functionality, charts had to either be pasted as images into Google Slides or they had to be created using shapes. When the underlying data changed, a more up-to-date chart image had to be pasted into the slide or the shapes had to be modified. This could be very time consuming.
Google has provided two ways to embed data-driven charts right within individual slides.
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