#110-Here's All You Need to Know to Move Your Business to G Suite

G Suite puts everything a corporation needs to conduct business in one suite. A Joshing Moth can help you move to the platform so that you can cut costs and achieve maximum productivity. Let's understand the features of G Suite first.

A business must offer tools for its staff, teams, and departments to connect with each other. A unit cannot contribute to the growth of a corporation in a significant manner if it is isolated from its peers. There needs to be a constant exchange of information among units because that's what fosters growth. G Suite offers multi-dimensional tools that are built to ensure all units of a business remain connected under all circumstances.

Gmail for Business that is part of G Suite is a very secure platform for business communication. It is ad-free. When you use it, you can get custom email addresses (@yourcompany.com) that reflect professionalism. When a person outside your corporation receives an email from an address of your custom domain, it adds great value to your corporation's brand. The accounts can be managed centrally by the IT admins across the corporation. It has support for group mailing lists, for instance, design@yourcompany.com, offline usage, and leading desktop mail clients such as, Apple Mail, Microsoft Outlook, and Mozilla Thunderbird. If you are using a legacy service to manage your mails now, you can easily migrate to Gmail. You can totally forget about spams the day you move to Gmail for Business. The most important thing is it offers 99.9% guaranteed uptime. It has support for up to 30 email aliases for each user. Through aliases, a user can have more than one email addresses.

If you are reading this article, you probably know very well that those days are over when calendars hanged on the wall, stayed on the desk, or in the drawer but, do you know that the days of using a separate app for calendars are over too? We are leaving at a time when calendars need to be fully integrated to a corporation's workflow. G Suite offers integrated shareable online calendars for teams. Events can be planned quickly checking colleagues' availability. The Google Calendar can be accessed from all your devices. It comes with easy web publishing. You can import your business calendar from legacy platforms. There is support for CSV files too. It helps in office space and resource management to a great extent. There is support for group calendars and event reminders.

Businesses cannot live outside of society. A business cannot serve a society if it does not understand it. On the other hand, an often ignored truth is, every corporation is a society in itself. Google Plus is becoming the preferred corporate social network where employees are socializing with each other. Your corporation needs a place where coworkers can safely share internal events, schedules, updates etc. without risking unnecessary exposure. A corporate social network acts as a private online forum where ideas can be shared among and within teams. Remote workers can also participate in a discussion regardless of where they are. You have total control over the privacy settings of the shared content. The IT administrator can choose to block all user profiles from appearing on the public web, if necessary. On Google Plus, photos, videos, and other media files can be shared which means no more dry discussions. Share product demos, mockups, user acquisition infographics and more. The platform has apps on both leading mobile platforms, Android and iOS, so staff can easily go through the latest updates from the corporation. In addition to that, they can easily share photos taken on a business trip, for instance, when visiting a newly acquired startup's manufacturing facilities.

A team messaging application is a must for a corporation at present. Using a dedicated app for team messaging offers a number of benefits. G Suite has the perfect tool for this purpose. Its Hangouts Chat redefines collaboration. You can discuss docs, sheets, and slides comfortably. In addition to that, you can also schedule meetings within the chat. It uses enterprise-grade security technologies so your discussions remain secure. The search feature allows you to scour past discussion threads so that you can revisit decisions that you or your teams made or the underpinning of those decisions. It is compatible with all popular device formats and that means your employees can come in from wherever they are and whenever they want. It is available as a web app and also as native apps. It has support for bots. It is compatible with the classic Hangouts.

Hangouts Meet makes joining a video call a delightful experience while ensuring the highest possible security. All you need to do is set up a meeting and share the link. The interface is fast and fluid. It has nice participant management features. If you start using it, you don't need to get stressed over whether all participants have the required plugins to join the video call. An employee can join a meeting right from a calendar entry or an email invite because Meet is a part of G Suite. With apps for Android and iOS, joining a meeting is a tap away. A very unique feature of Hangouts Meet that comes with G Suite enterprise edition is dial in support. It creates a dial-in phone no. automatically when a meeting is created. If a participant happens to be in a location where there is no wifi or data coverage, they can dial the no. and join the meeting. The guest only needs to tap twice to dial in the no. The same meeting URL can be sent to an external participant if the necessity arises. It is useful when you need someone from outside, for instance, a management consultant to join the meeting.

In a corporate environment, every hour content is created. It might be the press release for the annual general meeting, product brochures, or the internal surveys. Content created needs to be of pristine quality. The quality of content depends on the tools used to create them. Let's have a look at the content creation tools offered by G Suite. The tools are fast, efficient and make creating content a breeze whether it is a document, a spreadsheet, or a site.

Google Docs has taken collaboration to new heights by providing a browser-based word processing platform that supports co-editing. You don't need to install any software solution or suite on your machine. You just need to have a browser, preferably chrome, which is the most popular browser anyway with a 61.20% market share at the moment, and that's all you need to savor the deliciousness of Google Docs. An entire team and outside consultants can work on a single document at the same time, with edits being visible real-time. It comes with a built-in chat where a person can have a quick discussion with their teammates between edits. It supports comments. It is compatible with various popular document file formats, from docx to pdf. You can export a finished document in a variety of file formats. It has a feature that is worth a million dollars. You can see all the changes made to a document and undo it if you want. Previous versions of a document are preserved forever, and these do not count against the storage space. It offers total control over document access rights. There are three access levels on Docs, view access, comment access, and edit access. Access can be granted at the individual level or at the group level. A document can also be shared with an external person. You can extend the core functionalities offered by Docs through third-party add-ons. Google Docs has offline support on chrome and can be used on Apple or Android devices.

We are all familiar with spreadsheet solutions that give us a headache. G Suite comes with a smart spreadsheet solution that is so comfortable to use that many people fall in love with it once they use it. Just like Docs, Google Sheets also supports simultaneous use. An entire team can work on one sheet at the same time. In spreadsheet-based data analysis, formulas and functions play a pivotal role. Google Sheets supports smart formulas and sophisticated functions that make data analysis a walk in the park. It has autosave and so there is no need to worry about saving changes. It has support for pivot tables, charts, and data filters. It supports other popular spreadsheet file formats such as, MS Excel. A sheet can be exported to .xlsx, .csv, .ods, and other file formats. The sheets can be created, edited, and shared from any device and place. It has support for offline usage. The explore feature lets you unveil hidden trends and stunning patterns from the data in the sheet. It has commenting, chat, access rights control, third-party add-on support and is perfect for doing form-based surveys. It has support for keyboard shortcuts that you are probably very familiar with.

Corporations have a lot to gain from surveys, both internal and external. Surveys reveal facts and figures that can never be found in any other way. If you are bored with the surveys and forms solution that you use in your corporation, Google Forms is the tool you are looking for. The drag-and-drop reordering, support for popular question types along with data validation, support for smart collaboration, and support for custom logic ensures the best possible survey or form creation experience. Once participants submit information through the form, Google Forms prepares automatic summaries from their responses. Its integration with Google Sheets helps in convenient data analysis. It supports real-time submission. The forms created are easily shareable ensuring an appropriate level of privacy and security. It can handle large response sets. We would like to clear a misconception regarding Google Forms. Many think that a google account is required to respond to forms created with it, but that's not true, anyone can fill and submit a form created with Google Forms.

The next content creation tool from G Suite that we are going to discuss is Google Slides. Any person who has spent a considerable amount of time on the receiving end of corporate presentations is familiar with situations that arise due to inefficient use of presentation software. With Google Slides, it is not an option. It impossible for presentation creators to use it inefficiently. It is that simple and efficient. It has support for real-time co-editing, unlimited revision history, chat, commenting, and offers total control over access to the presentation. You can start a blank presentation or use one of the stunning templates that are available. Slides supports media, transitions, and works flawlessly on all popular device platforms. Many of us are familiar with the difficulties of rehearsing a presentation with a laptop minutes before the presentation. With Slides, that is a thing of the past. You can rehearse a presentation from your phone or tablet.

Importance of internal corporate sites is not something that can be ignored. A corporation needs these for a myriad of purposes. In addition to being a place that employees, project team members, for instance, can use as a base of collaboration they are often useful in ensuring internal corporate transparency. Google Sites is the tool you can rely on to create internal sites in accordance with the highest possible aesthetic standards. A site created through Google Sites can be made accessible from outside, if the need arises. The sites had a previous version that too was very popular. If your corporation is one of those that used the old version, you will have absolutely no issues during migrating to the new version. You don't need to be a programming genius or a pro designer to create a site. The tool is intuitive and gives you full access to all the documents and other content in G Suite that you have been granted access to. There is no need to get stressed about how the site looks on different devices as the sites created are fully responsive. Google Sites supports co-editing which means your entire team can work simultaneously on one site, seeing and critiquing each other's changes in real time.

Executives agree that the Achilles' heel of corporations is fractured workflow caused by unavailability of the right business apps. What do you do when your business needs apps? You either call your in-house team or outsource it. G Suite's App Maker lets you develop feature-rich business apps on your pc or laptop and helps you bring your ideas into reality in minutes or hours, instead of weeks or months. Google launched its beta in late 2016 and made it available to all in June, 2018. The templates and the drag-and-drop interface makes data-powered app development almost an equally easy task for the seasoned app developer and the enthusiast. It is part of G Suite business and enterprise editions. It presents a low-code development environment that ensures fast app development with minimal coding. What makes it even more powerful is you can use apps script on app maker to unleash the full power of Google Cloud Platform. The apps created remain under the control of G Suite administrators and they can see usage, metrics, and other stats of all apps. It supports white-label app development. It has built-in support for Cloud SQL and is compatible with non-Google databases.

It is not uncommon for a corporation to struggle to keep ideas, concepts, and notes organized. It does not work very well when members of the same team have notes sequestered in their machines or various online accounts. Google Keep is the tool that's ideal for a business that struggles with notes management, collaboration, and punctuality issues. You can create and edit notes on the go, even when you are offline. The edits are synced across all devices where you use Keep. The app offers captivating features such as, fast filter-based search, time and location based reminders, reference support from Google Docs etc. that will provide you with the highest level of satisfaction during note creation and editing.

All the content created are of no value if you do not have a safe and secure way to store and access them. Security is paramount in today's cyber threat laden corporate world. G Suite's storage and access tools are built to protect your corporation's information against the most dangerous threats.

Information is at the heart of every business. Information lives in files. These files alone can determine the fate of a corporation. Google Drive provides a safe and secure storage for all files that matter to your organization. G Suite's business and enterprise editions come with unlimited storage and that means you will never run out of storage space. The basic edition comes with a 30 GB storage per user. If your corporation is using a different file storage solution at present, there are migration tools and services available that will help you move your files to Drive. Drive offers state-of-the-art features to prevent data loss. Its machine learning-powered predictive algorithms tell you in a small fraction of a second, which file you need to access at the right time and in the process it saves a significant amount of time that would otherwise be wasted in searching. The Team Drives feature lets you organize files from different teams efficiently without making it difficult for team members to access the files. You can access the files in the Drive without using a browser through Drive File Stream. Drive supports a wide range of 3rd party apps, from LucidCharts to DocuSign, integration with MS Office, over 40 different file formats, expiration feature, central administration, and excellent support.

An unlimited storage is of no use if you cannot find the information you need when you need it the most. G Suite not only offers you the tools to create awesome corporate content, it also offers the tool that gives you the power to search across all your content, that you are permitted to access. Google Cloud Search is the G Suite-wide search tool that will rescue you minutes before an important presentation. It offers the same comfort of Google Search (search engine market share: 72.21%). It has assist cards that keep you on track on a busy day. It supports person search i.e. searching detailed information regarding a colleague in the company directory. You can also start a Hangout with the colleague right away. Cloud Search is available to G Suite business and enterprise edition customers. It is available on the web and popular mobile platforms.

Control is the most important ingredient of smooth administration. If the business affairs are not in order, there will be confusion everywhere and that is never good for business. Control ensures clarity, and clarity, in turn, ensures continuity. G Suite offers the tools that safeguard the administrators' interests instead of discombobulating them with features that are utterly useless. It improves visibility and transparency in a corporation's operations and thus is undoubtedly a weapon of great value in the arsenal of corporate governance.

G Suite's Admin Console puts you in charge of everything that really matters and provides you a bird's eye view of the entire business. In addition to the web version, the Google Admin app is available on the two most popular mobile platforms and so administrators can do their job when they are out of office. From security configuration to user management, every administrative task takes a few seconds on Admin Console, due to the fluid interface and smart controls. It supports mobile device management. It is common for executives to spend sleepless nights due to the distributed nature of business operations. It is almost a nightmare for the IT administrators to keep track of the apps that are in use by the employees and the data that is scattered among employees. If you move to G Suite, the Admin Console will ensure those harrowing days of IT administration are gone forever. If the administrator sees anything suspicious, they have the option to lock or wipe out a device in a moment. A normal user can be granted administrative privileges, if required. In case of a complicated incident, support is beside you twenty four by seven. There are hundreds of apps waiting for you in the G Suite Marketplace that extend the capabilities of the Console.

Google Vault is a unique app that is part of the business and enterprise editions of G Suite. The basic edition users can purchase it as an add-on. It offers G Suite-wide archiving of corporate data and search features. It has audit reports feature that is useful in tracking activity inside the Vault and helps in ensuring accountability in a legal situation. You can set retention policies that suit your corporation the best. You can be very specific while setting the retention policy, for instance, you can set policies for individual units or you can set a policy for the entire corporate domain. It supports exporting past versions of Drive files. The search feature of Vault lets you search information from suspended accounts. The e-discovery features that come with vault protect you against bad lawsuits.

A good portion of the business operations is performed out of office on mobile devices due to the flexibility and convenience offered by the platforms. In a recent Forbes insights study it was found that, "Smartphones are second only to laptops in the executive’s arsenal of devices." Many business owners run their entire business from their mobile phone. Employees depend a lot on mobile devices to ensure timely completion of tasks assigned to them. This trend began more than five years ago. A document published in 2012 from Forrester Consulting mentions, "Workers are increasingly mobile, and a majority of enterprises are focused on supporting the growing number of employees who use mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets to do their work at the office, at home, and while traveling." It is a challenge for corporations to ensure data security at a time when employees use a variety of mobile devices ranging from iOS to Windows and others. That is why G Suite offers mobile management as part of the Admin Console so that a stolen phone does not succeed in bringing a corporation to its knees overnight. It offers usage reports, Play Private Channel support, and bring-your-own-device policy support.

A Joshing Moth can help your corporation move to G Suite. It has years of experience in serving corporations worldwide and the expertise required to do the job. Due to the invariably excellent quality of service in all its assignments, A Joshing Moth's name has become synonymous with hundred percent client satisfaction. If you place an order with them, you will soon discover that they see an order not as an order but as an opportunity to make a real difference in your business. The prices start at $250 USD only, with only 25% required to get started, the rest can be paid after the transfer is done. If you want to discuss anything regarding the transfer to G Suite, now is the time. 

Image credit: Andrea Piacquadio, pexels.com