10 Reasons to Upgrade to Google Workspace (G Suite)

Upgrading to Workspace just makes sense!
Odin Odin (181)
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In late 2019, Google G-Suite rebranded to Google Workspace to meet the expected trend of remote work destined to increase in the coming years.

Google Workspace provides a powerful ecosystem for improving workflow and tightening security...

Google also began rolling out new features to help organizations become more effective in their administration of remote work, expanding the already impressive G-Suite experience and promoting special features that are specifically geared to remote workers and those working from home.

With everything your organization needs in one spot, Google Workspace provides a powerful ecosystem for improving workflow and tightening security, as well as providing tools tailored to different types and sizes of organizations. Check out our primer on how to use Google Workspace for small teams and startups.

What's more, Workspace allows companies of any size to take advantage of Google’s powerful Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, as well as Google’s new low-code and no-code development platforms (Apps Script and AppsSheet, respectively).

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Ensuring that team collaboration is undertaken effectively is a challenge even when every team member can be physically present. Still, that challenge grows ten-fold when the issue of remote work is added in. Thankfully, Google Workspace is specifically geared toward solving this problem with several features that help promote better remote work habits and collaboration.

How collaboration in Workspace works

Version control becomes instantly redundant because all of the work happens instantly, at the same time. This means that collaborators on any Doc, Slide, or Sheet, can connect and work within the same project where changes that are made are instantly reflected for everyone to see. Workspace tools like Team Chat, Google Meet (for video conferencing), Team Calendar, and Currants (a Slack-like communication system built within the Google architecture) allow teams to collaborate more effectively, eliminating confusion by ensuring that all the utilities needed to work and communicate are easily accessible from a central infrastructure.

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Google Drive for individuals is one of the points that makes the Google infrastructure so widespread, but Google Workspace offers a powerful update to this for teams in the form of Team Drive, where items can be shared and uploaded for the whole team to quickly and easily access.

What makes Team Drive so good?

Not only does it simplify the process of sharing data between team members, but it also simplifies the process of issuing information from a team-leader perspective. Now information can easily be uploaded to a single central location within the Google Workspace, granting access quickly and efficiently to those who need it.

Team Drive allows for enhanced security, ensuring that information is available only to those parts of the team that need it. This also means that if a member leaves the project, their access to materials can easily be revoked from Team Drive. In contrast, previously, they would need to have their access revoked to each private account that the data had been hosted on.

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Ordinarily, emails from a Gmail address are branded with “@gmail.com,” but Google Workspace allows you to connect your domain and use it as your email’s suffix. This looks more professional and provides your team with a consistent identity for interacting with each other and the exterior world.

A complete team email solution

Not only a domain be connected easily, but email aliases can also be easily added, and all emails can be viewed and tracked from a single inbox.

Customer relationship management software is vital for sales teams, HR teams, and other areas of a company where streamlined workflows and easy database management become vital. One of Google Workspace's biggest benefits, especially for small businesses, is the ability to interlink directly from Workspace elements to exterior CRM, ensuring that all work that connects to outside programs is processed from within a single infrastructure. This can cut down on user error and ensures that administrators have a verifiable log of everything occurring.

How does Workspace integrate with CRM?

Using Workspace’s integration capabilities, team members can connect with exterior CRM from within Google applications (e.g., allowing a user to send data to CRM software from within Gmail), as well as providing CRM with a centralized database for storage and retrieval through integration with Google Contacts and Google Drive.

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Ensuring that your information is safe and your company’s and your teams’ security is accounted for can be a major headache from a non-centralized platform. With Admin Console, administrators can keep track of every aspect of the Workspace environment from a single screen. Users, groups, admin rights, and app controls are all available with a click of the button.

Advanced capabilities

Reports is one of the most powerful features of the Admin Console on Google Workspace. From here, admins can check for potential security risks identified automatically by the software, get quick highlights on important information about the Workspace, check up on app usage, see activity results for different team member accounts, and run full-scale audits on the whole Workspace environment.

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It’s not enough to just keep things secure from within the cloud if that data exists in an unsecured form on devices elsewhere. That’s where Endpoint Management comes in, a feature set that Google has carefully implemented to address business security concerns. Google Workspace admins can also use Endpoint Management to install applications at scale on team devices removing potential friction with large teams and multi-device teams.

How does Endpoint Management function?

Company data can be kept secure by enforcing access only through devices with screen locks and strong passwords enabled. Data on remote devices can also be wiped remotely, and accounts can be selectively wiped as well. Endpoint Management supports BYOD (bring your own device), allowing team members to use their own devices to access the Workspace. Best of all, the integration and registration of team member devices is quick, easy, and seamless. As soon as a new device is enrolled, everything is automatically implemented by the system.

Single Sign-On and Multi-factor Authentication are other powerful features for productivity, usage tracking, and security, ensuring that the Workplace environment provides a smooth and safe experience for all members of the team.

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From a legal standpoint, it’s vital to keep a total record of everything that occurs within your organization. Vault makes the process of maintaining an archive of all such pertinent data easy. It bundles everything: from chat logs to edit logs in one handy space, ensuring that you have a complete backup of everything that occurs.

How does Vault work?

Through eDiscovery, Vault allows admins to audit all account activity and export it as needed into any number of standard formats. This ensures that regular backups of all Google Workspace activity can be made, keeping data safe even should an account be deleted (though Google still recommends suspending user accounts rather than outright deleting them). Best of all, Vault is included for free in Workspace Business and Workspace Enterprise.

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Website building has never been easier than with Google Sites. With Workspace, it’s easy for teams to work together designing a single site, communicating, and managing access all from within Sites itself.

What are the benefits of Google Sites?

Keeping the workflow within a unified infrastructure is vital for team efficiency and cohesion. With Google Sites, a team with no coding experience can quickly create internal team sites, public-facing websites, or project hubs: all from within the centralized Google infrastructure. Sites are automatically added and saved with Drive, and real-time editing of websites is possible, just like with any other Workspace app. Finally, all Google Sites websites are fully responsive, meaning they’re optimized for tablets and smartphones.

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Google’s AI infrastructure is one of the most powerful in the world and can provide businesses of any size with incomparable benefits. Using Google’s AI and machine learning systems to improve workflow, handle large data storage and parsing, and analyze information, provides powerful tools to Google Workspace users with a minimum of user knowledge or support.

BigQuery, Cloud AutoML, Explainable AI, Google Assistant? What tools are available?

The most basic and powerful AI tool available to workspace teams is Google Assistant, which, when configured properly, can streamline almost any part of a work-flow and team member’s scheduling. Smart management of email inboxes and text completion are functional tools already integrated into the basic Google architecture for Drive and Gmail.

Diving deeper into Google’s AI offerings, such as with BigQuery, allows a business to utilize a cloud-based data warehouse (replacing typical hardware setups) where all information from an organization can be stored and later perused using either human or Artificial intelligence.

For even more advanced AI features, Explainable AI provides a set of tools and frameworks that help users easily understand the output of Machine Learning models.

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Using Google’s Apps Script (a Workspace-integrated low-code development platform), it’s possible to easily create customized work to suit their needs, regardless of experience with code. The coding process can be simplified and automated, and nearly any Google Workspace application can be customized to suit businesses of different types and sizes.

How does Apps Script for Google Workspace work?

By making it possible to build custom applications with little code experience, a vast amount of customization can be undertaken to build a Workspace that suits any need. Completely cloud-based within Google Drive, Apps Script ensures that users do not have to leave the Workspace to modify the workspace. Custom logic and automated processes become an easy task for teams.

The most functional suite of productivity tools currently available.
Michael Michael (175)
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Google's been hard at work creating an all-in-one solution for business productivity that skirts the need for having lots of secondary software for teams to communicate and get things done.