G Suite was what we were looking for, and more.
Updated July 30, 2019
G Suite was what we were looking for, and more.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with G Suite
We use G Suite across the whole company. It has let us be agile with licensing and features, and made it easier for us to administer the system by being a cloud based solution. We trust that Google has more expertise and resources to build redundancy and availability into their systems, so we don't have to fumble with those things on premises.
- It has good uptime and redundancy. Certainly better than we had when we were managing our own email server.
- We can scale up or down in real time, and costs are pro-rated, which is important with any business that has fluctuation in it's employee base.
- With email, document storage/sharing, and sites, it allows us to manage things in one location.
- The fact that so many other services have built in "Sign In With Google", it makes it easier to deploy or integrate with other technologies.
- It would be nice to have Google be the "be all, and end all" of our authentication across all systems. I know it is possible to do most things through Google Cloud Platform development, but that is beyond the capabilities of most smaller companies. IdP, LDAP, SSO, etc.
- Better options for "network storage", to migrate off of a traditional model of having a network drive for company/team use. The higher tier of G Suite has Team Drives, which partially helps address this, but does not do it well enough to eliminate our old network drives without sufficient training of users to break habits that they have been trained to do for decades.
- Where is the ability to "flag" emails as important/urgent? I know if someone using an email application such as Outlook flags an email and sends it to me, Gmail is able to show me that flag, but there is no way for me to actually set that flag from inside Gmail.
- It took away the constant headache of administering and troubleshooting our company email server.
- When we signed on, the pricing was better than the alternative cloud solutions with similar offerings. There is also the added bonus of the cost in CAD is the same as USD, so Canadian companies basically get a discount :)
- Our security and compliance around user authentication has been so much better since we use G Suite as our primary login, and other systems use the "Sign In With Google" option. We just enforce the Two Factor Authentication on G Suite.
- Negative: The password policy settings in G Suite only specify a length, so you can't configure complexity, etc. Even the Mobile Device settings in G Suite allow enforcement of those settings on the mobile devices, but for some reason you can't enforce those settings on the actual G Suite passwords.
When we were planning to migrate off of our old Exchange server, G Suite (Google Apps, at the time) was the only online option that had the features we needed for a reasonable cost. I had used Gmail for years before, and set up a local non-profit club with Google Apps, and really liked the functionality, even with only email in mind. The other features were a bonus.