GSuite: What you need to know

Why would you get a GSuite?

Gsuite is best used for an organisation/small business that might be spread across multiple locations, with multiple employees/team members.

You should think of GSuite from a business point of view.  It’s internal and only you and any team members you’d employ would access it.  You could share documents, calendar info etc.  To explain a bit more, imagine you work in an office (don’t know if you ever have) and the office has an internal email system, calendars, instant messaging and document file system that all workers for the company can access, and of course people from outside of that organisation can also email into it.  That’s what GSUITE is.

So for example it’s brilliant for us at the workingwithdog team – as we don’t have a physical office where you’d normally have a business based system.  We are all home workers so need to access a shared space in the cloud.  That’s what we can use gsuite for.  We don’t use the calendar functionality but as a team you can see when people had space for a meeting etc. We can work collaboratively on documents, and see what updates people have made to them.  And we can manage an email account like for example I manage help@workingwithdog.com.  But in the future that could easy be given to someone else as it’s part of the gsuite rather than my personal email.

What will you be able to access from GSuite

• GMail using your own domain email address
• Google Calendar
• Google Drive
• Hangouts (Google chat)

What won’t you be able to access/manage from GSuite

• Google Analytics (Could be wrong about this – https://support.google.com/a/answer/6304816?hl=en)
• Google Brand pages / Business pages (public facing page) Brand accounts are different to GSuite.  They are the public facing accounts for your business, you have your G+ business page, videos on youtube promoting the brand, reviews, public photos etc. So the brand pages are necessary to keep as they are.  They will not be affected by their domains being added to the gsuite as you don’t access email/calendar through these brand accounts.
• YouTube (there is an internal youtube within GSuite where you could share training videos with other team members – but it’s not a public facing YouTube as such)
• Google ADSense

What does it cost?

$5 per team member

What are you really paying for?

• If you add more than one domain you can manage all your emails from one gmail account 
• Emails can be sent from any domain from within gmail, but they will have a little message included in the email header that they are sent on behalf of your main domain.com email address.
• I can set up labels so you can easily see which email the message was sent to.
• The ability to use the gmail interface using your own domain email address rather than a @gmail.com one which looks unprofessional
• Theoretically people like using the gmail space – it can be a lot better than web based email programs you get with your hosted account.
• Increased storage in email and google drive
• The ability to share documents with your team via the cloud
• Track changes on shared documents/presentations
• Unlimited email addresses for your domain

Other than emails in one spot, if you’re not looking to grow a team then I’m not sure on what other benefits you would get (but I’m not an expert so there might be some things?)  

What you need to do?

1. Ensure you understand what benefits you get for your business by setting up a GSuite by having read the above.
2. Check what google accounts you already have and logins for those…see below.  Potentially you will need a temporary google account set up, and add this temporary account as a user to your additional google accounts (talk to Tracey if unsure).
3. If you have a google calendar, export any google calendar information you want to add to your gsuite https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/37111?hl=en 
4. Export any email you want to import into your new gsuite (talk to Tracey if unsure).
5. Decide on the main domain for the new GSuite account.
6. Send Tracey login details for your domain registrar (often your hosting company).
7. Send Tracey details of any other domains/email addresses to be added to the gsuite
8. Once your GSuite is set up – you can use the information below to add your domain email address to your various Google accounts if you want.  You won’t be able to manage these public facing accounts from your GSuite though.  (Aside from the gmail/google calendar account)

What google accounts do you already have? What email do you use to sign in to these? 

• YouTube
• Google brand page/business page
• Google Analytics
• Google AdSense
• Google Webmaster tools
• Gmail
• Google Calender

Google doesn’t let you have a normal google account and a gsuite with the same login/domain.  If you are using an email that will be associated with the domain you are using for GSuite, then you’ll need to sign up for a new google login (this will be temporary and once your new gsuite is set up you will not need this any longer).  This can be anything you like using @gmail.com  EG mytempgoogle@gmail.com

https://accounts.google.com/SignUp 

Then you will need to go to any of the google accounts you already have and make sure that you assign this temporary address to them.

This is quite a tricky process, and can take a bit of untangling.  REMEMBER THIS IS ONLY IF YOU ALREADY USE YOUR DOMAIN EMAIL TO ACCESS GOOGLE ACCOUNTS.

Gmail/GCalendar accounts

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/176347?visit_id=1-636500519511058898-3681850920&rd=1 

Google analytics

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1009702?hl=en 

Information about Brand pages/accounts, including adding managers

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/7001996?hl=en 

YOUR BRAND PAGE https://myaccount.google.com/brandaccounts

Click on each of the brand pages…

Manage permissions and add your temporary email as an OWNER.  Then we have two ways of getting into the account should anything unexpected happen.

YouTube

You should make sure any work related videos are linked to a channel managed from your brand page

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3056283?hl=en-GB 

Google AdSense – changing email addresses

https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/161758?hl=en-GB 

Google My Business – add users

https://support.google.com/business/answer/3403100 

Google Webmaster tools (Search Console) – adding owners

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2453966?hl=en#manage-owners