G Suite is Google’s suite of intelligent apps. This was formerly known as Google Apps, till it was re-branded in late 2016. We primarily recommend G Suite for clients that are needing email hosting for their business. However, G Suite is much more than just email. It also includes a variety of apps and features that can come in quite handy. In fact, you’re probably already using or are familiar with some of them.
G Suite essentially allows your employees to have their own Gmail accounts with email addresses with your business domain name (example: john@yourbusiness.com). A very small business with one or two users might be able to get away with free Gmail accounts and some alias + forwarding rules. But once you start hiring two or three employees, you’ll find yourself needing accounts that can be managed separately.
Google Drive allows you to store, access, and share your files in one secure place. You then have easy access to them from any device. G Suite Basic plans come with 30GB of storage for every employee. G Suite’s Business, Enterprise, and Teams editions provide unlimited storage so you will always have enough space for your files. Note: If you’re a smaller team with fewer than 5 users, you only get 1TB/user.
If you haven’t used Google Drive before, one of the best things we like about it is the amazing search functionality! Although, it’s probably not too surprising seeing as they also run the largest search engine in the world. Did you know that you can search based on the content within a document (regardless of the file name)? Pretty handy. This means you can easily find what you’re looking for, no matter how disorganized you are.
Google Docs and Google Sheets pretty much speak for themselves and again are tools we use every single day. You can even import Google Docs into WordPress. These allow you to create and edit text documents and spreadsheets right in your browser. Import your documents to make them instantly editable, including Microsoft Word, Excel, and PDF files (.docx, .doc, .pdf, .rtf, .txt, xlsx, .csv, .html, .ods).
You can also export to common third-party formats. This makes it easy to collaborate with other individuals or companies and send files back and forth, without ever needing to install or purchase additional software.
Note: Google Docs and Spreadsheets created directly in G Suite don’t count towards your storage limit.