My thoughts after using G Suite for 14 days free trial

I initially came across G Suite years ago. I would often recomend G Suite to our digital agency clients who needed a robust email solution. We traditionally would set clients emails up as iMap addresses attached to their website hosting. This is no longer our recomendation for a few reasons, not the least of which is you want to have your email service seperate from your website service in case of the situation that your website gets hacked. At least if you have all your emails with a provider like G Mail you can keep doing business until your hacked website is recovered.

I was reluctant to even try the free trial at first as I am one of those people who doesnt want to give over all my data to the big cooperations. I am expecially skeptical when it comes to handing over the framework of my business.

We all have that fear that if we hand over our email service, our passwords, our online files etc that we will be spied upon by the big players like Google, Microsoft and Apple.

Yes I had this concern for many years. But the fact of the matter is if you live in todays world these companies already know a lot more about you and I than we think they know.

And over the last year or so I found myself recomending G Suite to more and more of my digital agencies clients. A case in point was when I recomended G Suite to a customer of ours (Shout out to Envirocom) and the owner came back to me a week later absoulutly grateful for the recomendation and shouting the many features that he and his team have added to their daily workflow. These systems and features like hangouts, Groups, Chats, Google Drive and more were a huge help to this business.
So after a period of hesitation I signed up for the G suite free trial.

My initial thoughts are that the Suite was fairly easy to sign up with. The interface is intuitive in the usual simplistic Google fashion. Once you sign up you are presented with the G Suite admin dashboard. From there you can add users, add domains and more.

The next step after signing up was to migrate my domains across. As a digital agency managing paid clients as well as many pro bono clients we have quite a few email addresses atatched to multiple domain names.

So I was a bit nervous about messing with these domain names and email addresses. So I thought after recomending to our clients for some time now that they try G Suite as their CMS (content management system) that we should at least put our words where our mouth is. I decided to migrate the email service for AusDigitalMedia.com across to G Suite.

I have to say the process was painless and stress free. Not like many other times I have migrated systems from say Windows to Apple.

So then it was time to migrate across the other domains that we manage. The good news is that under only one G Suite user account on the basic level I was able to migrate across multiple domains and all the relative email adresses. The multiple email adresses across multiple domains are set up as email aliases in the G Suite logic system.

Again all emails migtrated across and the migration tool took care of the existing emails being transfered from the website servers to the G Mail system.

G Suite has three levels of pricing. The three levels of pricing offer different features at each level. For someone starting out in business, they might choose the Basic level. For small to medium businesses, the Business package would suit. And for larger business entities the Enterprise package would be suitable. G Suite offers a 14 day free trial across all 3 pricing tiers.

I think the pricing plans are good value. I mean you need to consider the services that G Suite is giving you. You not only have a robust email service with scheduling ability (Apple mail lacks this crutial business tool) but you have Google sheets, Hangouts, and much more.

But the main system that you are buying is company security. As a feature of G suite you can store all of your company documents in the cloud and only have them be accesable to your G Suite users.

Now when a team member leaves your company and you revoke their user access to G Suite they no longer have access to all your intelectual property.

You can also use this system to control mobile devices like company phones and tablets.

So the few dollars per user per month is not a big price to pay.

G Suite is not without its competitors.

Microsoft has its Office 365 product but in this authors humble opinion Microsoft products are not intuitive. Let’s all admit it. Everytime you want to do something with Microsift you have to jump through 2 or 3 hoops first before you can get started on your task. here we do use Mac and I wish that Mac had an all round system to compete with G Suite but unfortunatley they do not.

But the good news is the Google suite much like Apples operating systems across their devices seems to be intuitive and user friendly. The UX works each time. Google boasts a 99% up time guarantee on their website which is also reasurring.

My thoughts on the G Suite product is so far it’s great. It’s only been 2 weeks but I amjoying knowing that I have set up this business with the tools for growth.

Each time we bring a new staff member on board all we need to do is add a new user for only a few dollars per month and that user can have an email address and imediate access to all the company documents stored within the Google business account. It’s like opening the digital doors to the back end of the business with a couple of clicks.