It’s finally time for Google to enter the fray of collaborative working. The various office solutions have always existed but G-Suite wasn’t quite the all-encompassing collaborative work solution that teams sought. Microsoft have been able to full collaborative solutions and other services like Slack have been a core of team communication. I spoke about Google’s move to get a piece of the pie with an upcoming revamp of G-Suite in another post and that time is finally here. Google wants to be the core of all your team work and are offering “Everything you need to get work done, now in one place.”
The included applications in the current workspace offering includes Gmail, various builders for office and surveying and now a new meet and chat solution so teams can effectively communicate while working. As a G-suite user, these are welcome additions and I appreciate admin controls along with Endpoint and Vault. Endpoint allows management of access devices, a prime security measure. Vault is as it sounds, a place to lock, retain and archive important data that can easily be indexed once processed.
With a number of pricing tiers, business customers will need to choose a plan that meets their needs. The Business Starter plan is the cheapest option per user but seems to strip out meeting recordings saved to G drive, moderation, attendance tracking, noise cancellation and in-domain live streaming. Some of the upcoming features will also be omitted from the base tier and the shared drive for teams is also missing, quite a big deal. The subsequent tiers such as standard and plus seem to be best bang for buck and will accommodate either 2TB of storage per user or 5TB depending on business needs. Enterprise solutions are also available and Google offer custom pricing for this.
Overall, I feel that Google’s entry into an ultimate collaborative working suite is a positive move for online working in general. In a world where remote working is becoming a necessity, we should welcome new solutions and offerings. Pricing for the current line of products seem reasonable and might attract custom for a number of smaller SME’s or even larger enterprises looking for new infrastructure to run projects on. As with anything, some training and management will be needed to deploy on Workspace but everything seems to be well documented and admins and project managers will be able to make well informed decisions before migrating.
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