Increasing Collaboration with GSuite
August 15, 2018

Increasing Collaboration with GSuite

Garett Dunn | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with G Suite

It's used across most groups in the organization. It allows people to collaborate on documents much more easily than having to email files around and keep up with the current version of a doc. And having the tight integration between all the apps makes it much easier to get things done.

Pros

  • Good integration between all the different apps
  • Everything is cloud-based, which makes it much easier to keep track of your files, keep them versioned, and work wherever you are. You don't need to keep an extra set of applications updated
  • Collaboration is much easier. Files in Drive (and the apps that access those files) can be shared easily and viewed and edited by multiple people in real-time
  • Much easier to keep track of files. No longer do you have to rely on emailing files back and forth, and worrying about whether everyone is looking at the same version of the file

Cons

  • Some apps have features that are missing from competing applications (Microsoft Office...). For example, the document applications lack a lot of the power-user features that Office apps have. But for 95% of the work you do it will suffice.
  • Some of the apps have weird limitations. For example, in Team Drive, you can't copy folders into it, only files. This makes it time-consuming to move files that were once in individuals' own Drives, and dumping them all into Team Drive, as you have to Manually create folders and put files into them, rather than just being able to copy a top-level folder into Team Drive. Features are consistently added over time, but some apps are missing features like this which would seem obvious to most users.
  • Getting buy-in from diehard Office fans can be hard. It's hard to convince some folks that they don’t want a local copy of every file they have on Drive (that's not synced, either), or to collaborate over docs online, or to be comfortable with the archiving functionality of Gmail (you don't have to worry about managing archive files) instead of managing GBs of Outlook archive files.
  • Reduced a lot of time spent in confusion over what version of a document everyone should be looking at
  • Less time spent managing email
  • Greatly increased collaboration over files
  • Being able to easily track changes in files is something I don't know how we did without before
Office 365 is nice, and the online apps are good. However, in my opinion, if you're trying to get people adopting a cloud-based approach to office applications, using Office 365 will not be enough, as people will fall into old habits and not fully embrace the benefits of cloud-based office applications. They will continue to use them the way they always did.
Honestly, I think G Suite is well suited for most organizations, and in most scenarios. There is some niche power-user functionality of Office apps that you won't get with G Suite, but I think most people aren't as niche as they think they are. Also, there are "cloud" ways of doing office work, and "desktop" ways of doing things. My opinion is the "cloud" way is superior in most ways and preferable for most people. But many times it just comes down to people learning the strengths of one paradigm over another.

Comments

More Reviews of Google Workspace