Having a professional company email with your company domain (eg: joshua [at] techlify.com) is sometimes done using your web host manager’s server and then used via Webmail or Microsoft Outlook.
We’ve been transitioning more and more of our clients from server-hosted emails (BlueHost, GoDaddy, etc.) to GSuite recently. As an organization, there are a number of benefits of using GSuite that far surpasses simple email.
Business Email via Gmail
With GSuite, you’ll be able to access your company’s email via GMail. This in itself has a host of benefits
- SPAM. Emails get sent out from Google’s server and are less likely to be spammed
- Speed. Your emails get delivered faster and you also receive emails faster.
- Security. Gmail has built-in security notifications and features allowing you to verify the sender’s authentication. It also allows other senders to verify your emails are genuine since they come from Google’s server
- SPAM Protection. Gmail’s SPAM filtering is best-in-class and constantly improving.
Group/Shared Emails
Yep, a bit redundant with the first point – I highlighted this as it’s own section as this is a very powerful tool for your company. Google allows you to have unlimited group email addresses for which emails can then be directed to multiple team members. For example, sales@mycompany.com can be a group email address and any emails that come into that address can be set to go to all salespersons within your company. You can have team@mycompany.com – any emails going here would go to everyone within your company for company wide broadcast emails.
Shared Storage
With GSuite, you have 30GB of shared storage via Google drive for each team member with a GSuite account.
The shared storage also has some nifty and easy-to-use Security Features allowing company-level file sharing, access restrictions and collaboration on documents and files. It also allows file sharing at an Individual level, group level and even publicly for clients. Google Drive tracks ownership and changes to files.
All files within Google Drive are also Searchable, making it easy to find information
Improved Team Collaboration
GSuite includes a number of tools that allows your team to easily collaborate and share information. These include:
- Google Docs. Creating, developing and sharing documents, spreadsheets, powerpoints, etc. with your team and clients
- Google Calendar. Allows your entire company to have interlinked calendars and to also create company-wide calendars. Techlify uses a shared calendar called “Team Holidays” that includes all holidays for all countries where we have team-members and clients including Guyana, the USA, India, Venezuela. This allows us to all keep in touch with each others’ holidays.
- Google Drive. Share all types of files, photos, videos, etc.
Enhanced Data Security
Google Drive store all your data safely in the cloud. You don’t need to worry about saving your files and documents on your computer and devices, which can lead to data loss when you lost them. Your information is stored in data centers around the world, and you can access it anytime.
Data centres also take care of data replication which means you don’t need to worry about a server crash and managing your own backups of your files.
Google Drive also has a nifty trash can which captures any documents deleted by another team member, this further provides a level of data security to ensure no document is deleted by mistake.
File Versioning of all files and documents created and updated via Google Docs also ensures that you are able to track changes to files and documents.
Enhanced Company Security
Using GSuite, you can force authentication for all team members to most other apps directly to their GMail accounts. GMail has oAuth integrations for most web apps including collaboration tools such as Slack, JIRA, BitBucket, etc.
When a team member leaves, it’s very simple to deactivate his/her GSuite account which then deactivates all company accounts for this team member, while leaving the company in full control of all documents & data of this team member.
Others
There are numerous other benefits of using GSuite or another collaboration tool such as Office365. Some of the others we make use of at Techlify include:
- Google Forms. Create and manage surveys to clients and collaborate with team members on creating and updating those surveys. Of course, if a team member leaves, the company still owns the survey.
- Google Admin Controls. Allows us to put company-level requirements such as two-factor authentication in place.
