Transcription
Google Workspace is much more than just email; it's a suite of cloud-based tools designed to streamline your business operations. Think of it as your all-in-one solution to communication, collaboration, and organization.
If you're a new business owner who operates online, I'm here to teach you everything you need to know about Google Workspace so you can kick butt with your operations like you've been in business as long as I've been around. We're going to start with Gmail, and I want to share some things with you that you might not know are in here and to help you get a little bit more out of the platform.
Now, Gmail lets you set up an email address for yourself and for your team members. You can create a professional look in your signature; you can set up group email addresses if you've got multiple people who need to receive emails. But Gmail also lets you share mailboxes, and that means that if you need one mailbox for multiple staff members to access, you can use a feature called delegated mail. And that allows your team to read and respond to messages on behalf of others, and everyone can see who's responded to a message.
Now, Gmail has 99.9% uptime, with no ads on the business version and 24/7 support if you need it. There's extra security, and spam is pretty much taken care of for you, and even phishing messages trying to steal your information are, in most cases, stopped by Google. There's lots of storage available for you, and a small business plan supports up to 300 users. This is a great way for you to manage email in your business.
And for those that are coming from Outlook or from Macmail, worrying if people will know that you're on a Gmail account once you make the switch, well, it's not a worry. Business owners and your colleagues, your customers, your suppliers will only ever see your business email address and your signature; they won't know that you're using a Gmail account because you're using your business domain name on all of your outgoing emails. When you send a calendar invitation, it will come from your email address, not a weird Google address, and those calendar invitations will work with Macmail or Outlook or anywhere they're being sent to.
The best feature of Gmail is really the search. Unlike using Outlook or Macmail, which rely on a local search index, Google uses the cloud to find all of your emails, and that means that whether you're on your mobile phone or working on your computer, you can always search through hundreds or thousands of emails on the go, and even if they're from years ago, you'll be able to find them in just a moment. That's because you don't download every single email to your device when you're accessing them, and as long as you've got a connection to the internet, well, you can go back through your full email history easily.
Next, let's talk about Google Drive and cloud storage. It gives you up to 5 terabytes per user, depending on the plan that you have access to. Now, you can place all kinds of files inside your Google Drive. If you want to put in a PDF or an image file or a video file, that's totally fine, and some of them you can even access and edit in the browser.
Now, if you're using any Microsoft format documents, you can also place them in your Google Drive too, and you don't even have to convert them into the Google format. If you want to open an Excel or a Word file, well, you can open them right inside of Google Chrome, even without a Microsoft license. And that's good if your staff members need to access Microsoft document formats from time to time, but you don't want to pay for a license for everyone in the company.
Now, of course, the real power of working with Google Drive is using Google Documents, but more on that in a moment. Google Drive is designed with sharing in mind, and so the sharing features allow you to share with anyone inside your company or outside your business as well. Someone, in most cases, just needs a Gmail address to access the documents. And if you've got a document like a pricing list that you want to keep up to date and share with people outside your company on an ongoing basis, well, they don't even need to sign in; you can just send them a link to the document, and they can easily access it online.
Now, one of the best features of Google Drive is the ability to set up shared drives, which are different to My Drive and different to Shared folders. Shared drives have a very special feature, and that is that any file placed into a Shared Drive becomes company-owned. Yes, once you set up a Shared drive, you are in control of the data and information in that shared drive. You can choose who can delete things, who can place files into the folder, and even what happens once a file is in there. Maybe you want to stop anyone from being able to copy or download or print a file in a particular shared drive. That's great for your training materials or your business intellectual property that you want to share with someone to read but not steal. Shared drives allow you to set robust permissions to make sure that your business data doesn't accidentally fall into the wrong hands or disappear when you don't want it to.
Let's talk about the collaborative power of Docs, Sheets, and Slides. The real magic of working with Google Documents is the ability to work in real time, collaborating with your colleagues and even those outside your business as well on spreadsheets, documents, and presentations. We love the ability to work in real time rather than attaching a document to an email and sending it back and forth or putting something in Dropbox and waiting for it to synchronize. When we work in real time, it means that our remote and hybrid teams are able to get work done without the back and forth of linear working. We love the ability to bring in third-party applications and integrations into our documents to enhance the functionality, and the fact that these documents live online means that any updates happen in real time. And if we've got them connected to a third-party app or an API, like maybe someone filling out a lead form on my website, if I choose to have them automatically drop into a spreadsheet, it's going to happen pretty much instantly.
I like the ability to use Smart editing with machine learning and AI built-in, which means that Google even helps me to do some of my work for me. Google have now released Gemini, which is still pretty early days in its usefulness, but there are some features that have come to the documents that can make your work just that little bit easier.
Speaking of AI, have you noticed in your email that with one button you can click to respond to a chat message or an email with a pre-drafted response? These are smart composed suggestions, and Google are just trying to help save us time using machine learning, and I'm always a fan of that.
Google Calendar is probably one of the tools that you're already familiar with, and it helps you with all the basics of scheduling, reminders, and sharing your calendar with others. But one of the features that I really love that Google have made a lot better in recent years is the ability to set appointment slots. Usually, paying for an extra third-party calendar app is the norm for business owners to allow someone to book in or schedule with you for work or for catching up for a coffee. But having this built into Google Now means that you and your team can save time on emailing back and forth asking, "Are you free Tuesday? Are you free Wednesday?" and just giving someone a link to access your calendar straight away.
I love the ability to set a working location in my calendar, so my team know where I'm working from. It means that they're able to see, and they know when it's a good idea to check in with me or not. And of course, running a remote team, which is quite large now all over the world, we need to be able to know when a team member is actually working and when they're taking time off or when they're just not on a work day. I want to make sure that I'm not scheduling meetings at an inconvenient time for one of my colleagues, so setting work hours and work location really helps us to make sure that scheduling is a breeze for everyone. If you've got an office with a meeting room, you can even set up a resource calendar to book out particular resources, which make it easier for those to be reserved for different people.
Let's talk about Google Meet. And if you're someone who's still using Zoom, or I don't know what else you would use, maybe Skype or Facebook Messenger for your business calls, well, Google Meet has been completely rewritten a number of years ago and is now the powerhouse of our communication for a remote team. Now, not only do we use it internally for all of our team meetings and anytime we schedule a calendar event with multiple people, it automatically places a meeting link into that event, but including for outside meetings, outside our company, Google Meet is an absolute breeze. You can, with one URL, allow anyone to join a meeting with either the Gmail app or a web browser, and they're able to quickly meet with you or your team for whatever reason you need to get connected.
One of the features that I love about Google Meet is the fact that when you record a meeting, it will automatically place that recording straight into your Google Drive at the end of the meeting. It will also transcribe your meetings for you as well, so if you want to grab that text and turn it into some bullet notes or drop it into ChatGPT and manipulate it in some way to get the insights from the meeting, well, that's all available for you there as well. If you've got an international team member and maybe they've got a strong accent or it's a little bit difficult to understand because your language is not the native language of the company, well, captions provided in meeting may help you to understand what's being said.
If you're someone who loves collecting data, one of my favorite features of the Google ecosystem is Google Forms. Now, technically this sits within Google Drive, but I'm giving it its own special mention. Not only do Forms allow you to collect information internally, but also from those who are external to your business. You can turn them into quizzes; you can connect them to a spreadsheet and do data analysis and pivot tables on your data, but you can also use Forms to collect information that can be sent to pretty much anywhere, because once you've got information in a form in a nice format in a data spreadsheet, well, you can then connect it to apps which may automatically notify someone in Google Chat, which might automatically send off an email or just pop up in your screen and let you know that a new entry has been submitted.
Some of Google's best consumer features are also available in the Google Workspace ecosystem, like Google Keep. It's a great little app for jotting down notes, creating checklists, or even recording voice memos, and it synchronizes across all of your devices and including the web, so they are always accessible. You can also use Google Tasks, so connected to your calendar and connected to other areas of the business like Google Chat, you're able to keep on top of what's happening and what your responsibilities are to take care of things. Now, Tasks is not necessarily my recommendation to run a whole business on if you've got a large team, but if you want to take care of one or two responsibilities yourself and you need somewhere to drop them down, well, Google Tasks is great for that.
If you're an advanced user with hundreds of employees and you're interested in additional security features like data loss prevention, information rights management, and the additional features to lock down the encryption of your emails and even send secret encrypted emails to those outside your company, are all available on the Enterprise versions of Google Workspace. There's lots more to cover on that, and we've got other videos covering those features on the channel.
If you're looking to elevate your business with Google Workspace, let our team guide you through the setup, ensuring that you fully leverage all of these tools. We have instant tech support services available on our website if you need something right now, or if you'd like an order and a checkup on your account, or please make sure you reach out to our team. If you're ready to unlock the full potential of Google Workspace for your business, we are here to help. Jump on the website and schedule a call with our team, and in the meantime, keep hunting around the channel; there's plenty of value here to learn more about Google Workspace.