G Suite (aka Google apps) is a hosted service from Google, which brings together essential services and applications to help your business. This service allows organizations of all kinds to utilize a variety of Google products — including Email, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Google Talk — on their own unique domain. (www.yourcompany.com)

Up until December 6, 2012, Google made a free Standard version of G Suite available. This edition had fewer business features than the current paid version. If customers had access to the Free edition before it was made unavailable, it is still operation without charge. The subsequent version of  G Suite costs $50 a year per user annually for the Basic Plan.

Which Services are Available Through G Suite?

Google’s basic offering was Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Sites, Groups, and Chat. In the past four years, Google introduced Google Plus,  which is a visual platform for sharing ideas and working together on projects. Google Hangouts was a part of Google Plus, and has now replaced Google Chat.

  • Hangouts: Google hangouts provides seamless messaging and video conferencing from any browser and any device. Google Apps users are also provided with a personalized video conference link which easily embeds into their calendar events.
  • Vault: One of the newer applications available through G Suite is Vault, which allows company-wide search, storage and retrieval/export of mail data and chats. This is an important application for administrators and organizations with a stringent policy protocol on data retention. This tool saves organizations significant time and money if they ever need to defend themselves or provide proof of a disputed transaction or interaction.
  • Keep: Google Keep is an online note-taking service which provides an assortment of tools for taking notes, utilizing text, lists, images, and audio. Users can set reminders; text from images can be extracted using optical character recognition; voice recordings can be transcribed. Notes can be color-coded, in single or double columns, and labeled for organization. Some of the more recent editions have added the ability to pin notes, and to collaborate with others online.
  • Drive: One of the most innovative and useful application in G Suite is Google Drive (formerly Google docs). Drive  provides cloud-based storage and real time editing as users create text files, spreadsheets, forms, presentations, and drawings.

    What Can My Business Expect from G Suite?

    As of this writing, there are two standard levels of service with G-Suite.

    G Suite Basic: The basic service costs $5 per user per month. It includes a business email address for every user; the ability to make video and voice calls; access to integrated online calendars; 30GB of online storage for file syncing and sharing; access to online text documents, spreadsheets, and slides; east creation of project sites; security and admin controls and 24/7 phone and email support.

    G Suite Business: The enhanced version of the service costs $10 per user per month, and includes all of the services available at the Basic level. In addition, Business users can expect unlimited storage, advanced admin controls and reporting insights, for eDiscovery for emails, chats, docs; and the ability to search and export to different formats. Users can also archive all emails, set message retention policies, and place and enforce litigation holds on individual inboxes.

    If you are considering which cloud-based services are right for your company, don’t go it alone. The team of professionals at Alliance IT is here to sort through all of your options, and to help you to ascertain what are the best options for your organization. When it comes to expert advice and managed services, look no further.