G Suite is the serious business version of GMail, and it really makes your email work for your business.
Everyone knows a Gmail email address, and how awesome the Gmail platform is. Their emails look just like one of these;
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
Let’s assume you’ve been using free Gmail accounts for your business communications. Or… worse yet, you and your staff may even be using a mixture of Outlook.com mail, Yahoo mail and the ISP’s email addresses (ie @bigpond.com, @bigpond.net.au) for business purposes.
However, your business is expanding and/or things are getting chaotic – you want to start to use more professional looking email addresses such as:
You see.. potential clients are much more likely to trust AND do business with a company that uses a professionally branded email address than those that don’t.
Did you know you can easily get a business email addresses based on your company name (like above), but continue to have the exact same Gmail user experience that you and your staff have become accustomed to?
This is where G Suite fits in and makes email that much more efficient as well.
The email component within G Suite is simply the business version of Gmail. No training is needed for current Gmail users.
You may or may not be fully aware of the extent of your free consumer Gmail account functionality — but your Gmail account includes a whole host of features, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, Google Forms, Google Drawings, Google My Maps and Google Sites.
The main features of G Suite
Google Calendar – shared calendars for appointments and events.
Google Drive – cloud storage for your documents, photos, data, anything! Securely accessible by your computer and other devices like smart-phones.
Google Docs/Sheets – word processing and spreadsheets. No installed software needed and runs totally in the browser.
G Suite includes collaborative business versions of all of these and more.
G Suite does come at a cost: $5 per user per month. However, this a pretty low cost for what you receive — and is, in our opinion, far outweighed by the efficiencies gained by the professional business platform that is G Suite.
We ourselves know it well. We use G Suite for gooroo.com.au. And it’s a beautiful thing. Having integration throughout our business saves us tons of time! Sounds like we’re excited? It’s because we are!
So.. if you already own a company domain such as lismorecomputers.com.au for your company website — the one you got from a provider such as SiteGround, Digital Pacific, GoDaddy, MelbIT — there’s a straightforward one off setup needed to use the same domain for your G Suite email addresses.
Basically, in a nutshell, all web traffic goes to your current hosted website. And, all emails go to G Suite and managed by this professional platform.
We all know just how good the Gmail interface is, but now you can do it with your professionally looking company email address.
But there is so much more…
The Benefits of G Suite
Here are a bunch of additional reasons to consider a move to G Suite.
1. Ownership of the Email Account
Actually this one is quite important! Your company owns all employee and contractor email accounts. Your staff don’t own them. What if a staff member was to leave your company to work for a competitor or to start on your own, but they personally own the email address that your customers used to contact them? You can see the risk here.
Within G Suite administration, if someone leaves the company, you can immediately change that person’s password and forward any emails sent to their address to someone else in your organisation. You can also access all of that person’s email history.
2. File Ownership
With G Suite, all Google Docs, Slides and Sheets created by employees are owned by the company.
Keep in mind that Google Drive is also a cloud backup alternative to services such as Dropbox. You could create a company policy that requires staff to back up their local workstation or Mac work folders and files to the company’s Google Drive.
If, for example, you decided to terminate an employee, you would have full access to all ‘their’ business files.
3. Sharing of Documents
It’s easier to share documents with your staff when you’re all on the same G Suite account. If you wanted to give all staff read only access to a Google Doc or spreadsheet, this can be setup with only just a few clicks.
4. Group Email Addresses
You can easily email routing to multiple people or to a customer service system such as Zendesk, Freshdesk or Salesforce.
There’s no additional cost for creating group email addresses. And, you can add as many as you want.
5. Supreme anti-Spam
This is one of our absolute favourite features. G Suite has one of the best anti spam solutions in the world, and its baked right into it’s email system. It incredibly accurate. If you have used the free consumer gmail system before, you’ll know what I mean. This protection alone is well worth moving to G Suite.
6. Multiple Email Aliases
For any G Suite user, multiple email aliases can be configured. With email aliases, they point to the main account. So, sales@ can be pushed to multiple email accounts.
7. Ability to Use Outlook as an Email Client
For staff who insist on using Microsoft Outlook, or it;s needed for company’s business programs, Google provides Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook.
However, we used to use Microsoft Outlook within G Suite (or when it used to be called Google Apps for Work), but quickly found the web interface for email to be way more flexible than having Outlook installed and configured for EVERY device the staff used. It’s quite liberating to just get into email from any device any time just by logging into the web browser and getting to work.
8. More File Storage
The default storage for free Gmail accounts is 15GB. For G Suite Basic, it’s 30GB per user.
There are a number of options for increasing storage beyond the 30GB per user.
9. Extra Security With 2-Step Verification
G Suite has an important layer of security that can be enforced for all users, if the admin decides to do so. This layer is known as 2-Step Verification and makes G Suite bullet proof.
If you log into G Suite from an unknown computer, you’ll be SMS’d a verification code. There are other methods to getting verification codes should you don’t have your mobile accessible – ie backup codes in your wallet.
2-Step Verification is particularly important if you decide to use Google Drive as the cloud backup standard for company PCs or your Macs. If employees are automatically backing up a lot of local files to the cloud, you never know what sensitive information might be getting synchronised.
You can make 2-Step Verification optional or you can make it required for all users.
