Google G-Suite : Right Choice for Your Business

Organizations have needs—office documentation, e-mail, personal communications (including chat), and scheduling and organizing solutions such as calendars. We’ve said plenty about how Google’s productivity applications can make a difference to you as an individual, so why must you settle for less just because you can’t use your Gmail ID for work? G-Suite for Your Domain gives you all that Google goodness and lets you keep your work ID—what’s better, you don’t have to bear the cost of a dedicated mail server anymore!

Google apps which is newly branded as G suite will take care of everything for your organization now. All new G Suite gives you a host of applications which can help you manage day to day activities like managing users, collaboration, integration of Zoho, Dropbox and storage for all organization data. Well, how about the price now? G Suite is very affordable when it comes to pricing. They have basic, business and enterprise plans which you can choose and you also opt to try it free for 14 days and then pay. Get an additional discount of 20% per user using G suite promo code, when you start your first payment, this makes G suite even affordable.

The Whole Package

To start with G-Suite, visit www.google.com/a/. Only domain administrators can sign up for G-Suite services—this is for improved security and to prevent anonymous users from abusing domains. On the G-Suite page, enter your official e-mail address and click on Get Started. After this, Google verifies you as the administrator of the domain, and in a matter of minutes, your organization should be registered. On the next page, fill in all your details and provide a password, with other contact information. With an initial e-mail user count of 200, practically any small or medium business should be able to complete its transition to G-Suite in less than twenty minutes. You can also add more users later. Accept the terms and conditions and proceed to the next page—the dashboard. This, as the name suggests, is the panel with all the controls—it is nothing but the administrative page of your domain.

On the dashboard, are several major services— the Start Page, Calendar, Chat, Docs, Email, Web pages and Sites. Before proceeding to these services, create a list of users in your organization. To create new users, simply click on Create New Users. For each user, fill the three data fields—name, surname and username. G-Suite provides you— the administrator—with a password that can be changed later by the new users. You can also upload a compiled list of all users in the CSV (Comma Separated Value) format, and all users can be created at once. This makes things really easy for you.

Start Page

The Start Page is where you access all Google applications. You can personalize the start page in the same way you personalize your iGoogle page— bring together your content, other Google services, and interesting applications from the. The URL for the Start Page is typically http://start.your-domain.com. The first time you click on the start page, the typical feeds available are your e-mail— where you can see a snapshot of the new e-mails in your inbox as well a shortcut to compose a new mail. Other useful applications that you find on the Start Page are Calendar and Sticky notes, which is an online alternative to the post-it.

Calendars

The calendar is a critical tool in time management. Access your calendar at http://calendar.your-domain.com. Insert an event in the calendar by clicking on the respective date, at the start time of your event. In the balloon that pops up, type your agenda. If you realize that the event is going to consume more time than the default hour, you just have to drag the lower end of the event box. You can share calendars with each other, and know when members of your team are free or busy—this lets you plan activities around everyone’s schedule. You can also synchronies your Google calendar with Outlook (using third-party software), and even with your Blackberry.

Docs

Google Docs is another interesting tool that’s a part of G-Suite. With Google Docs, you can do away with the Office suite altogether. You and your team can collaborate on documents, spread- sheets and presentations all in one go! Google Docs offers you the option to share and publish your documents in to a unique URL. That apart, you can save it to a host of other formats too. This is of immense help to those people who are always on the move. They can start work while away from their workspace, without worrying about any data being lost. To use Google Docs, visit http://docs.your-domain.com. Once here, you can click on the new tab to the left. Of the options or Document, Spreadsheet or Presentation, choose any depending on your requirement. Once you start typing, Google Docs continuously saves your document as and when changes are made.

E-mail

In its basic version, G-Suite provides 25 GB of storage per user. The URL for your e-mail will be http://mail.your-domain.com. In addition, Google also monitors abuse@yourdomain.com and postmaster@yourdomain.com to report spam, abuse and other technical issues. Configuring the email addresses of your employees to G-Suite doesn’t require more than couple of minutes. There are two major steps involved in set- ting up your new mail service. First, you need to create new user accounts. Second, set up the email delivery.

To switch your domain to use Google Mail, you’ll need to change your MX records—you can do this from the administration page of your hosting provider. You can find instructions specific to your provider here: http://www.google.com/sup- port/a/bin/answer.py?ans er=87084. It takes around two days for MX records to get updated—to avoid losing e-mails during this time, first create all the e-mail accounts you need, and only then change the MX records.

You can upload the details of existing e-mail accounts in bulk using the CSV format—username, userid, password. Log in to the control panel and go to Advanced tools. To upload the list in bulk, go to User Accounts Bulk Update. Upload the CSV file, and you’re done. Once you’ve created the same user accounts in your control panel as you have in your existing domain, you won’t lose any new mail.

Another interesting feature that G-Suite provides is email reforwarding. For example, say you have an employee named John in your organization, and his email address is john.smith@ your- domain.com. If someone sends an e-mail to johnsmith@your-domain.com, you can set it up so that the e-mail reaches a “catch all” account like error@your-domain.com.

Chat

At times; teams in your organization may reside at remote locations or even client bases, making communication back and forth rather tedious and expensive. To reduce these ancillary costs, Google Talk is a viable option. With G-Suite, you can configure Google Talk within the users in your organization. To control the use of Google Talk, go to the dashboard and click

Chat—G-Suite gives you the option to warn your users when they chat with users outside your domain. You can use this feature to ensure no sensitive information gets out, and that your employees aren’t wasting their time chatting with friends.

Sites

Google Sites is the easiest way to make information accessible to people who need quick, up-to-date access. People can work together on a Site to add file attachments, information from other Google applications (like Google Docs, Google Calendar, YouTube and Picasa), and new free-form content. Creating a site together is as easy as editing a document, and you always control who has access, whether it's just yourself, your team, or your whole organization. You can even publish Sites to the world. The Google Sites web application is accessible from any internet connected computer.

Wrapping up

You get to take charge of all your online needs, without the hassles a typical system administrator faces. Google does all the dirty work for you, while you can focus on improved productivity and business related issues. Apart from this, if the Docs application is optimally used, you can drive the running costs to rock bottom by doing away with the office suite completely. With large corporate houses also showing interest in G-Suite, this is one upcoming trend.