Google Apps for Work is a productivity and collaboration application suite by Google. It is a 100% cloud-based subscription service that offers tools and applications similar to the Microsoft Office suite.(Word, Excel, etc.)
Moving away from the traditional MS Office suite can be daunting, but if you are looking for ways to move your business to the cloud using software-as-a-service (SaaS) then Google Apps for Work might be the perfect answer.
Below you will find 10 cool features of Google Apps, but I promise there are many, many more!
1. GOOGLE APPS VERSION HISTORY
Google Apps for Work including Docs, Sheets, Slides etc. All Apps have up-to-the-second version tracking. This means you do not need to manually save a document or keep multiple versions on file, the Google Drive integration means you can roll back to any single point in time whenever you need!
2. GOOGLE APPS COLLABORATION
All Google for Work Apps centre around collaboration. You can share individual documents with coworkers or set up entire shared folders in Google Drive. Each collaborator will be easily identified at the top of the Apps menu by a profile images and any changes made in a shared documented will be colour coded for easy recognition. All collaborative changes happen in real-time right in front of your eyes!
3. GOOGLE DRIVE IN BUILT OCR
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) functionality exists within Google Drive. This means that scanned documents or photos that contain text can be searched via the Google Drive text search feature. A real world example of this would be, searching through a folder of client quote documents by actual document content rather than the document file name. A very powerful feature!
4. MICROSOFT WORD AND EXCEL COMPATIBILITY
Even though Google Apps for Work is the perfect alternative to Microsoft Office it would be unrealistic to think every single business is going to adopt the suite. For this reason Google has built in compatibility with the common Office applications such as Word and Excel. You can easily open and save Google Docs as Microsoft Word .docx for example.
5. SEARCHABLE GOOGLE HANGOUTS CHAT HISTORY
Embedded within Gmail and Google Plus is Google Hangouts. This is text and video based real time collaboration tool, or more simply referred to as a chat or messenger application. One of the great features of Hangouts is that every message sent via Hangouts chat is tracked and recorded so it is searchable via the Gmail text search. Easy to find that great chat conversation you had with a colleague two days ago!
6. STREAM LIVE CONTENT WITH HANGOUTS ON AIR
Further extending Google Hangouts is ‘Hangouts on Air’. This feature allows any Google user to freely broadcast their own real time video content over the web. Team members unable to make an important meeting because they are out of the office? Broadcast the meeting via Hangouts and they can participate in real time.
7. GOOGLE MAPS INTEGRATION TO GOOGLE CALENDAR
Google Maps is part of everyone’s life in one way or another. It is leaps and bounds ahead of any other web-based mapping platform and is free for everyone. If you are a Google Apps for Work subscriber you have access to Google Calendar to manage your meetings and appointments. If you set a meeting up and add the physical street address, Google Maps will tell you exactly where the address is and validate the details for you. No more typos in your meeting location!
8. GOOGLE APPS FOR MOBILE
Mobile is everything in tech today. All of Google Apps for Work tools are available right now on your mobile device. Because the suite of applications is born in the cloud it is as simple as downloading the mobile app and signing in.
9. SIGN INTO MULTIPLE GOOGLE ACCOUNTS
If you are like me you’ve probably had a personal Gmail account long before you considered using Google Apps in your business. The good news is you can ‘have your cake and eat it too’! Google Apps lets you sign into multiple accounts at once, this allows you to easily switch between accounts without constantly signing in and out.
10. ENTERPRISE ADMINISTRATION
The last feature I wanted to highlight is that of enterprise administration. Many readers may be thinking that their Microsoft Exchange email system is too complex to be replaced by Google Apps for Work. Google has been very careful to also cater for larger, more complex organisations that also want to migrate their systems to Google Apps. There are complete enterprise management tools available which allow IT administrators to set security, manage data limits and restrict which users have access to which apps.
