Google Workspace Reviews

I use it for various aspects of my business (scheduling/calendar, email, etc.).

The two best aspects of the solution for me are the calendar and the email (Gmail).

In terms of email, I could probably do the same things with other programs, however, I find 90% of my usage is Gmail.

If I were to think about what could be improved for G Suite for business, if you're talking about automated processes or that kind of functionality, that would be great. If there were pre-programmable items, I think that would be very helpful for me. For instance, there's a lot of steps that I take to line up an agreement. I get a signed agreement, I scan it, it goes onto my computer (which is OneDrive), and then I need to open my email and email my administrator. 

That's a pretty repetitive task. If it is easier to create automated-type items or templated forms, that would be fantastic. 

The solution is not user-friendly and it doesn't integrate that well with Microsoft Office, which is one of the bigger business apps on the market, compared to Google Sheets and applications of that sort.

There needs to be more intuitive support on offer. I want to integrate more features into my business to get more use out of the solution without having to take hours and hours of time that I just don't have. How to integrate what and where requires research. I don't want to research how to work the solution. I want it to be clear about what it is I can build out and how to do it quickly.

If there was a better way to integrate the solution into all of my other devices, like my phone, I'd be happier with it. I'm using a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 device. If there was a way for all of this to be vertically integrated with Chat, Hangouts, and all the different items associated with the solution, where it would be in one place rather than all over, that would probably make it easier, and make it feel more integrated.

I also do not like how Google tracks every email I send.

With Google, I used to have to log in and pull it up and do everything on a webpage. I just find it much easier to work right off the desktop rather than on a web page, which is why I prefer the Microsoft Office suite.

In terms of using the solution personally for my business, I have been using it for three years.

I've found the stability to be not that great. The reason is that I've had opportunities early on where, instead of using OneDrive and my Microsoft account, I was going to move everything over to my Google Drive, but I got to a place where it would start blinking and flash, and I couldn't pull a document. I couldn't access my G Drive. It was just acting weird. For a while, it would freeze up and it wouldn't do anything.

I haven't had the issue lately. It was a problem which led me to stay with Microsoft. Right now I'm using Microsoft Outlook as my primary platform when I'm sitting at my desktop. It also seems to syncs with Google. 

I can't comment on the effectiveness of scaling the solution because I haven't really tried to scale it that much.

I've got an admin person that does a little bit for me, however, I mostly just use the email functionality.

My main thing that I do is sales and marketing. I'm not an IT guy, and I don't want to be an IT guy. If I have to go in and I have to figure it out for myself, then I'm not going to take that time to do it. I'll continue doing what I'm doing, which is to focus on revenue-generating activities. G Suite does not make it easy for a one-person business to go in and figure this stuff out and make it easy.

I do not find their support to be very useful.

They try to send you to a tutorial of some sort and these tutorials are not that intuitive for what I would call a lay person like me. There is no real service where you can get on the phone with an individual to walk you through it. It's pretty much self-discovery.

I don't have time to do that. If I have a problem, I need to solve it now and the way they have their support set up, what should take five minutes takes two hours because it takes an hour and 55 minutes to find what you need and it takes five minutes to fix it.

I went into G Suite, and signed up. I got a little help from my web developer, but I pretty much, I did it myself.

Once you are signed up, the one thing I don't like about Google is if you try to find any information, it is not really laid out that well. I've had some problems and I have spent hours trying to get it fixed. And when I finally find the answer, it's like, well, that wasn't that difficult, but it's really not easy to find stuff on Google. And I find their support to be lacking.

I handled the implementation myself.

I'm just a customer. 

I'm not sure of the version I'm currently using. I just use the business G Suite. I believe it's always the latest version that's available.

The only thing I use in G Suite is Gmail, Drive and the Calendar and that's about it. I'm not really using Google Ads. I do a little bit of YouTube stuff, but I'm fixing to convert that into putting the videos on my website. I just recently also used Google Voice.

In terms of advice to other companies, I'd caution that it's very difficult to use effectively. Users need to really make sure they're going to have to be able to vertically integrate it. If you're using Microsoft Office and Google together, you might want to just consider how to stay within the Microsoft Office platform. If you're going to use Google, you need to consider how you integrate that entirely inside your business.

I would rate the solution five out of ten.

There's a lot of opportunity in Google, however, their biggest two problems are that they don't do a very good job of protecting the privacy of the individual that's using G Suite, and it needs to be more intuitive and easier to implement.

The features we use quite a lot are the mail and Google Drive. We can store documents and share documents between both employees here, locally in Sweden, and we have an office in the US as well. It's a very easy way to share information and documents, and have online meetings and stuff with Google Meet. We use it quite a lot.

We have been using this solution for five years. 

It has been very stable, actually. I can't remember if we had anything that I actually can blame Google for. It's more our internet connection, we need to have it working for this work of course but no, it has been stable.

We just have around a hundred users. At that scale, it works fine. We haven't had any real problems with scaling. For our size company, it seems to be working well.

We have a couple of IT people here that manage it, but it's just a few hours. It doesn't really take much, it doesn't have many users. Fairly little maintenance is needed.

Support is actually not direct. You can search online for information from Google. We have been able to solve things that way, just finding information online. 

The initial setup was straightforward because it's totally web-based. We managed it via the web browser and we don't need any special installation of software stuff locally. It was quite easy to set up and start with.

We deployed it around five years ago, but it took a few days to get the basics. It was fairly straightforward. It took a couple of days and I think we had most of it up. We started using it and then we learn as we go with new features and stuff, but the whole thing was fairly straightforward.

There's always room for improvement but it works fairly well for what we need. The conference systems can always be improved of course, but it works quite well for most of the functions we use. Obviously, it's not perfect. Everything can always be better of course, but we are quite satisfied with it.

There is a cost per user, per month. It depends on how many users they have in the system. It's a decent cost anyway. It feels quite okay for what we get for it.

It's simple and easy to get working and started. You don't really need to locally install stuff, you have the browser and that's it. It's easy to set up and it's fairly flexible. There are a lot of apps in it like Meet or collaboration tools. It works well and we have been using it daily. It seems to be a robust and working system. We are quite happy with it. I would recommend it. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten. We haven't had any main problems with it. It's more like it could be hard sometimes to find your way through all the settings and using things like that. It's a flexible system, in general it's hassle-free.

In the next release, I would like to see more encryption of documents, mail, and things like that. There should be a better way to encrypt mail and documents that are pushed through this system. That would be some improvement or additional features that could be good to have.

Our primary use case for this solution is collaboration but we also use it for email and the calendar. We deal with medium and large size companies. We're partners with G Suite and I'm an IT cloud manager. 

G Suite has saved the company a lot of time. There's no longer any need to download files, everything can be edited online. 

The valuable features of this solution include content co-editing, content collaboration, email searching, and calendar sharing. 

I would ideally like to see a common space in the product where all the tools are shared within the same facility, something similar to Microsoft Teams, where all solutions are provided in one site. That would be a major improvement and an additional feature that would improve the product. 

I've been using this solution for five years. 

The stability is good and it permits collaboration, but I think in the last couple of years it hasn't been as good as the Microsoft solution. 

This is a super scalable solution. When you grow, it grows with you. We have almost 3,000 users in our company. 

I've had good experience with technical support. 

We didn't previously use anything else. The migration to G Suite came from the move from on-premises to cloud, from Lotus Notes to G Suite.

The initial setup of this product is very straightforward. Deployment time depends on the number of users because the administration is different if you're implementing for a large company. We have implemented in our own company as well as for our customers. It took three months to have it perfectly fine-tuned for our company including the migration from Lotus Notes. We are integrators so we did it ourselves. We used four people to assist and they now deal with maintenance if it's required. We have IT engineers, two administrators and two other IT engineers and consultants.

I would recommend any company carry out a good profiling of the people who are going to be migrated to the solution, and to implement a good change management adoption in order to have everyone on board. If you do this you have satisfied users and they are the ones who are going to rely on the tool and get all the advantages the tool provides.

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

We use it as our main email system, so everybody is on that email as a platform. We use it for collaboration, using their tools for Google Meet or Google Hangouts. We use it for their tools that are similar to office tools. They have a spreadsheet, they have what you would see in Office, and they have similar tools to that. I'm able to do a Word documentation or editor, and spreadsheets. We use it for meetings, so it is our counterpoint to an office type of thing.

It's certainly easier to meet. We have offices around the world and the ability to have a company meeting on Google Meet platform makes it a whole lot easier to actually have everybody virtually in one room at the same time.

The email and the meeting piece of it for the collaboration tools are the most valuable features.

Their tool called Sheets is the counterpart to Excel but it doesn't have the same functionality that Excel would have. So usually if somebody needs to go back to Excel or Office, it's because of Excel.

They should incorporate some of the formulas, the ability to pivot tables. For our finance team, anything that requires higher cap calculation or data analytics isn't as good in Sheets as it is in their counterpart tools.

My company has used G Suite for over four years. 

It's stable, lots of people use it. It works well for what we use it for.

We've just signed a contract to use it for the next three years, so we know we're going to use it for that length of time, even as the company continues to grow.

We probably have about 600 users and they vary roles between our executive users, the different departments, HR, finance, sales, marketing, and customer service. We use that same tool in our print facility. So we have fewer technical people that do manufacturing operations on the shop floor.

We plan to increase usage in headcount. I don't know that they offer something that we don't use. They sell add ons or third party products and we use some of them, but it's just continued use as we expand people.

Their technical support is good. When we have a question, they're pretty quick when answering.

The initial setup is straightforward. 

It's about $8.30 up a user per month. If you want to do archiving, things of that nature, there're additional costs for storage, if you upgrade particular users. So some users may have more storage and there are additional licensing costs for that. It depends on how much more they go beyond normal storage.

If you need basic functionality in a very mobile or dispersed workforce, it works great. When we didn't use Enterprise, it became time-consuming and complicated to manage. Sometimes you step up a tier just to be able to manage it more effectively.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. I think it's a good, solid product for basic functionality. It's easy to roll out, it's easy to use in a very distributed workforce until you get to the level where you need very specific things, it's great. Once you get to that, I need some specific functionality like in Excel, it doesn't offer that kind of advanced feature set. So it's the only reason it wouldn't go higher and also because of some of the complications. But it doesn't have an advanced feature set. 

The Hangouts feature is the most valuable aspect of the solution for us.

The Google Slides should be able to be available in a "read-only" format, even if they are downloaded. Currently, when you share a slide, it can be edited or even downloaded and edited. We'd prefer it if there was a way to protect them from being tampered with.

The user interface, especially on Google Drive, could be better.

I've been using the solution for three years.

The stability of the solution is perfect. It's very reliable.

The solution is on Google's public cloud. Currently, the solution is serving its purpose and I don't know if there are any enhancements needed.

I'd rate it nine out of ten.

I deployed this for a public administration with two hundred accounts. They were replacing Office 365 with this solution because of the price.

The features that I like the most are the centralized contacts, labels, the way that you can use Gmail from the web browser directly, and the accessibility from Chrome. 

Gmail has been made for Chrome. When you have Chrome, you don't have to add mail software.

There is a feature that people don't use a lot, and that is the multi-factor authentication. MultiPass Fido Security keys were the first to propose this built-in feature, but if you are using Microsoft, for a single sign-on authentication, you have to purchase another product like Okta to get a single sign-on and high-security authentication. 

G Suite and all of Google were the first to have a built-in multifactor authentication without needing to purchase another product.

Compared to Office 365, you lose many functionalities. For Example, G Suites cannot share contacts between users.

With Office, particularly with Outlook, people are not using labels but folders. They tend to create folders in folders, and this fails the mailbox migration.

When migrating, we were using iMac migration and people were using special characters in their subfolders. If you use a name with a special character like a slash in the folder, it will crash the migration, with no warning.

There is no pre-warning or anything to tell you that if you use characters in a file name that it will crash the migration. There should be some kind of warning, notification, or awareness regarding bad practices.

There should be a check of the account that you have to migrate that tells you if the Unicode Encoding of the subfolders is valid, and that bad names won't work.

To find the webpage information regarding the migration with email servers, you have to search the website documentation to locate it. This information should be on the front page.

When you migrate with Gmail, there is a lot of information with different functions of what we lost and what we will get. Office or iMaps and several other service line products are displayed as part of it. This section is large and should be in the frontline of the documentation.

In the search, whenever you type migration with Gmail or G Suite, it should be on the first page.

In the next release, personal contact sharing should be included. With Google, you can share documentation, presentation links, almost everything, but not contacts.

I have been familiar with this solution for four years.

I am not a user but an administrator of this product.

This solution is stable.

This solution is scalable.

I contacted technical support regarding the issue that I was having with sub-folders and special characters in file names. They helped resolve the issues. I like the support.

They are precise.

At one time when I had a mail server to migrate, I called Microsoft support and I spent several hours performing tests with the support team. In the end, the technician told me that I was correct, that there was an error in the official Microsoft documentation, and closed the case. My migration had an issue and the only answer that I received from Microsoft was that the documentation had errors.

When you are calling Google support, they have no issues in their documentation. If a function doesn't exist, they just sent you an email with the documentation.

The G Suite documentation is not complex, you don't have issues, but with Microsoft, there are many, an insane amount.

You document all of the migration stages, and there are many ways to do it, so your documentation should reflect that accurately to avoid finding issues when you are halfway through the migration.

I don't have the same issues with Google support and the documentation as I had with Microsoft support and documentation.

The complexity of the initial setup depends on the person. For me, it was easy and straightforward because of my experience. I have been using mail servers for almost twenty years.

It is easy for people who have set up mail servers at the start of the internet.

I deployed this solution for two hundred people with the assistance of some program users. There were at least two full days of preparation and two presentation meetings. 

After two days of implementation and stopped production, which was done during the weekend, it took one week to fix issues for users.

Many people don't understand that when you are migrating to a company, you don't need to use software for mail, and you don't need to have software to open Gmail. It's the main feature.

For me, this solution and the setup is easy, but for some people who do not have the experience, they see features and don't know what they are used for.

For the Cloud, people are using Active Directory or Outlook, but they should also consider Gmail.

As an administrator, you don't have to manage mail software and local mail storage.

When people are using Office 365 Suites online and they come from Outlook to the online version, they don't like it.

Gmail is made specifically to be used through a web browser. For some people, it's a con, but for me, it's a pro.

In France, many people are using old products and they have to use Microsoft Office, but for new companies, they are using new online modern software. When I meet with some of these companies, I push them toward using G Suite and Gmail.

Microsoft was the top in IT, and they were beaten by Okta with regards to the single sign-on, and Gmail could do a single-sign-on earlier than Microsoft.

I would recommend this product.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

The main reason I use this platform is to share ideas with my coworkers in a safe way and in real time. G Suite is a platform that unifies what the office requires. Email, calculator, and calendar, among others. It is also easy to implement and its performance is excellent.

Our experience with this product has been excellent. G Suite is a powerful suite of tools for messaging and collaboration that has met the fundamental needs of my company, both increasing productivity and reducing costs.

All the G Suite tools are in the highly secure and highly available Google infrastructure, and no hardware or software is required. The platform requires only minimal administration. In addition, G Suite applications are simple, and you can download browser add-ons for most tasks that are not compatible internally with Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides.

Despite being an excellent platform, I would very much like Google Docs to be more compatible with Microsoft Word.

Technical support for this solution is excellent.

I am completely satisfied with G Suite. It has a powerful set of messaging and collaboration tools comprising a range of applications. The components that I use most are its Slides presentation application, the Sheets spreadsheet editor, the Docs word processor, and the file storage platform, Drive.