Last week, Google announced a major change to its Google Apps for Work product: it is going to change the name to G Suite—a name, the company says, better reflects its mission to “help people everywhere work and innovate together, so businesses can move faster and go bigger.”
Let’s get straight to the point. In a support page about the name change, Google reiterates that very little, other than the name, is changing: “The new name and logo will appear in the Google Admin console, online help, and email notifications. G Suite is still the same all-in-one solution that you use every day, with the same powerful tools like Gmail, Docs, Drive, and Calendar. Your services and pricing remain the same.”
Google is insistent the name change won’t change how your business operates—if you’re a Business Intelligence 101 customer, your pricing won’t change, and your access to the same collaboration tools won’t be affected. Good news for those who are already in love with Google’s offerings.
Your relationship with Bi101 won’t change, either—we’re still going to deliver best-in-class offerings, like our Business in a Box product, and unmatched technical support. Because we “drink our own champagne,” in that we use the same collaboration tools that we offer to our customers, we’re already digging deep into the new features so that we can offer support and technical advice to our customers.
You might be wondering: Surely all this hubbub from Google has to mean there’s more than a name change? In our opinion, this is primarily a marketing-related change, so that Google can position its productivity suite not just a collection of simple “apps,” but rather a comprehensive suite that a business can be operated from entirely.
In a blog post, Kelly Campbell, the senior director of G Suite marketing for Google Cloud, says, “G Suite is a set of intelligent apps—Gmail, Docs, Drive, Calendar, Hangouts, and more—designed to bring people together, with real-time collaboration built in from the start.”
The word “intelligent” is of utmost importance here.
Explore in Docs, Sheets, and Slides uses machine intelligence to give you recommendations about how you might want to elaborate on or parse the information already present in your document, spreadsheet, or presentation. In a spreadsheet, this means that users can ask questions—”with words, not formulas”—to get answers about the data. For example, a user could ask, “What is the average profit by type of garment?” and receive exactly the information they need, without wasting time crafting formulas. In Docs, you can do research without even leaving the browser tab, and in Sheets, it’s easier than ever to search for a relevant image and drag-and-drop it into a slide.
In Drive for Android, users will also be able to use a Quick Access feature, which makes the most relevant files available at-a-glance. Google says that early research shows that Quick Access can halve the amount of time it takes for an employee to find a file. Drive, as a whole, is getting new features as well, as does Hangouts.
Beyond that, G Suite still offers business email, 30GB of storage per user, advanced administrative controls, data migration, and much more.
All the information about the new G Suite features can be found at their new website: https://gsuite.google.com/.
And to learn more about how Bi101 can move your business to G Suite, plus a whole lot more, check out our comprehensive Business in a Box solution.