G Suite can be a practical way to working with distributed team
August 25, 2017
G Suite can be a practical way to working with distributed team
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with G Suite
G Suite is used by our entire organization. I also used it at my former employer for over a year. We use the entire G Suite for document development, spreadsheets, presentations, and mail. G Suite was implemented along with a single sign-on tool to enable us to address our clients' compliance needs.
- Google Drive is an especially effective tool for us to share documents across the organization. Note that it can be tricky to encounter attachments in Gmail from outside the organization and saving them to G Drive. Usually you have to save it to the desktop, then drag over to Drive.
- Gmail, Google Hangouts, and communications are improved in comparison to Outlook and SKYPE.
- Google Calendar is increasingly used externally and allows us to send invites more seamlessly.
- Many people, myself included, have personal Gmail accounts. When you are on a single sign-on configuration, it is very cumbersome to sign completely out of SSO to check my mail. I've worked around this by NOT installing my Work Gmail on my phone so I can easily check my emails from my children's school, etc which unfortunately has to happen several times during the work day.
- There is absolutely no control over the formatting of emails in Gmail so if you're used to using an email for a mini-presentation, it is less desirable than Outlook.
- Google Sheets can be used like Excel but it pales in comparison in some more robust features.
- In comparison to Office 365, the simple tasks like writing documents, making presentations, sharing spreadsheets is significantly easier and you can add comments and see who is viewing your documents real-time.
- There was a negative impact on users who were not familiar with Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Presentations as well as Gmail at our organization. It was not an easy transition and many people were frustrated. I think if there had been some business process analysis and some change management - such as, 'how are you going to leave extra time to prepare a proposal using Docs? or if we had a trial run before we went live where we used the tools internally before having to meet external client demands that could have saved some heartache.
Office 365 was definitely not the same as the standalone PC products. I was not involved in the evaluation or selection of G Suite so I can't comment on whether there was a comparable suite. I do know we have a strong Bay Area - Northern California presence and it seems like they were significantly more prepared for the transition maybe because there are so many G Suite customers in the Valley. In our midwestern and eastern offices, it seemed like the impact was greatest.