G Suite Apps Basics

Cloud computing is a trend among businesses, and one company that’s leading it is Google. After years of development and upgrades, they’ve released a cloud-based productivity suite known as G Suite.

G Suite puts all of Google’s most popular apps into one package. Let’s take a closer look at all it has to offer.

Gmail
Gmail is Google’s webmail service, with over 1 billion users worldwide. Although Gmail is available free of charge, you can get extended features for a low monthly fee, including custom company email addresses, unlimited group addresses, 30GB of inbox storage, and 24/7 help desk support.

Hangouts
Hangouts offers instant messaging, audio/video chat, and screen sharing features. It allows you to create virtual rooms where employees can share files, organize projects, and even conduct virtual presentations for video conferences. Hangouts runs on any internet-enabled device with a camera, speakers, and microphone.

Calendar
Google Calendar allows you to stay in sync with your colleagues from anywhere, and on any device. These shareable calendars integrate seamlessly with Gmail, Drive, and Hangouts, so you can easily manage events, view and edit your schedule, and check your coworkers’ availability.

Google+
Google+ is a social network platform designed to help you connect, share, and collaborate with your team members. You can customize and filter the dashboard’s contents to display the news and updates that are relevant to you.

Drive
Google Drive is an online cloud storage platform that can be accessed by authorized users within your company from any device. It gives you as much storage space as you need and allows you to view common file formats without having to install extra software on your device.

Docs
With Google Docs, you and your colleagues can work on the same documents in real time, allowing for better collaboration and efficiency. You can also leave comments and communicate through a built-in chat box. What’s more, edits and changes are automatically saved, and you can restore previous versions of the document if necessary.

Sheets
Google Sheets is a cloud-based spreadsheet. Whether you’re looking to create tables and charts, perform calculations, or generate pivot table reports, Sheets has all these capabilities and so much more.

Forms
Forms allow you to build professional-looking surveys and questionnaires. You can collect answers by sending the URL to respondents. You can even track and analyze responses in real time to gain valuable insights from your surveys.

Slides
With Slides, you can work on a single presentation online with your colleague, your whole team, or even external contacts. It comes with a wide variety of design templates and custom animations to add some flair to your presentations. Just like Sheets and Docs, you can control who gets the permission to edit or view the slides with just a few clicks.

Sites
Want to build a project site for your team? These can be done easily, and without any prior coding experience. Simply choose a template from Sites and determine what needs to be put in place to make your website successful.

Google is constantly adding new features to each of these apps, so if you want to learn more about any of them, give our cloud computing professionals a call.