G Suite: Basic or Business?

Having a cloud solution for your business is vital in today's world. You need a place to store all your work, access it from anywhere, share it easily with anyone, and not have to worry about capacity, performance, or safety. These are some of the key features business' look for when considering a cloud solution. Google's G Suite offers all these elements and more.

G Suite is a professional office suite for businesses of all sizes. We at InterlockIT service customer domains with as little as 2 users and as many as 90,000 users. G Suite is a scalable solution that does virtually everything you'd expect from a productivity suite and more. To ensure businesses are only paying for what they need, Google offer 2 tiers for G Suite; G Suite Basic and G Suite Business.

What's the difference?

Here is a comparison chart of the two tiers. We find startups and small to medium sized businesses gravitate towards the low cost $5 per user per month G Suite Basic tier. Larger companies or companies that have a need for the additional features incline towards the G Suite Business tier at $10 per user per month. Compared to other productivity suites, G Suite is an exceptionally low cost economical solution for most businesses and doesn't sacrifice quality and usability. It's a bulletproof platform that's both universal and scalable to meet your specific business needs.

Which tier is right for you?

If you're looking to keep costs low and don't have the need for features like unlimited storage, team drives, and ediscovery/archiving, G Suite Basic will do the job - although in our experience many companies upgrade to Business as they grow. Professional email, shared calendars, online document editing and storage, video meetings, and much more are all available in the Basic model via applications like Gmail, Calendar, Contacts, Drive, and Hangouts. If what you're looking for falls here, then the $5 per user per month plan is sufficient.

For businesses that prefer premium and true business-grade services, G Suite Business is the route. In addition to all the features included in the Basic model, G Suite Business subscribers also get the following:

• Unlimited storage - Store large sized files and as many as you want without worrying about capacity limits.
• Google Vault - Manage, retain, search, and export your organization's email and on-the-record chats.
• Advanced Drive controls - Gain additional insights with audit reporting, custom alerts, and APIs
• Audit and reporting features - Gain additional insights with mobile audits and alerts, such as when a device is compromised.
• Mobile features - User's get G Suite on their managed mobile devices and administrators can control Android devices owned by the business
• Team Drives - Manage content ownership and sharing at a team level with more granular controls
• Administrative control - Offers a deeper level of administrative control compared to the Basic tier 

Google doesn't allow businesses to pick and choose different tiers. Each G Suite subscription is domain wide, meaning everyone in your domain will have the same tier. You cannot upgrade some users to use G Suite Business while others use G Suite Basic.

Upgrading from G Suite Basic to the Business is simple. Contact your G Suite reseller and ask them to upgrade your domain. The process is quick and is seamless to end users. If you don't have a reseller, give us a call and we can take care of the entire process for you!

Why you should use a Google Cloud Partner!

More than 5 million businesses use Google's collection of productivity apps known as G Suite (formerly known as Google Apps for Work) and over 5,000 businesses sign up every day. With such a large and growing user base, Google relies on partners like Interlock IT to provide customer relationships and expertise, personalized outreach, and a broad range of services to users. Partners like us also provide essential services that allow users to take maximum advantage of G Suite, ease their initial setup and assist with migration, customization, and the general user experience.

Our team at Interlock IT helps companies move to the cloud to streamline productivity, user experience, and cost. As a G Suite reseller we manage hundreds of global G Suite customers and are occasionally asked what the benefits are of partnering up with a reseller. There are many reasons why it's useful--and in many cases better--to have a reseller manage your G Suite domain. Here are just a few:

Data Migration and Deployment
As the first Canadian Premier Google Apps Partner, Interlock IT has a highly experienced and dedicated team to lead your transition to G Suite. Our deployment team addresses all migration needs, including deployment, integration, and adoption. Our team is here to ensure that your business has a smooth and seamless transition without any downtime or data loss. All data from legacy systems are safely transferred with utmost care. In our almost seven years of moving hundreds of customers to G Suite, we have not once experienced a lost email or file - you're in safe hands!

G Suite Integrated Add-ons
With our large customer base we have lots of hands on experience with G Suite integrated add-ons to cover your needs in any situation. Need to manage leads, contacts, and drive sales results with Solve CRM or Copper CRM? Want to replace your on premise accounting solution with Xero? Need time sheets, expense reporting, and online/automated credit card billing with Freshbooks? There is a wealth of 100% web browser based cloud software solutions available that deeply integrate to G Suite, eliminating separate login/passwords, and much more.

Support
Although G Suite includes free Google support, Google support reps are unfamiliar with your company and business needs. Compared to Google support, our smaller and agile team understands and builds rapport with our customers on a deeper level, maintaining a healthy customer relationship to quickly and efficiently resolve tier 2 support issues. We're a simple phone call or email away and can even submit/escalate support requests to Google on your behalf accordingly so you can focus on running your business.

Training
Many businesses don't leverage the full potential of G Suite until their users have received adequate training. With our engaging G Suite training sessions, we can demonstrate the features and best-practices of the Google experience. Our G Suite Certified Deployment Specialists stay up to date with the latest improvements and upgrades to provide a wide range of rich content training for all G Suite applications including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Google Drive. For businesses that prefer to maintain their own infrastructure, we also train IT administrators on Google's Admin console for fine-grained admin controls, audit reports, eDiscovery, and custom application development.

Custom App Integration
Every business has its own unique needs, and in some cases the out-of-box solution doesn't cover all the bases. Our team has ample experience with designing and integrating custom applications with G Suite. For example, Blink Reports is a product we created to bridge the gap between Google Sheets and Xero to allow Xero customers to build financial reports, charts, and virtual dashboards connected to their live Xero data. Need standardized signatures? Need to synchronize G Suite users with your school administration system? These are just a few examples of solutions we've custom built for our customers. If there's a cloud application that your business needs to integrate with G Suite, our team is ready to design and deploy it!

Among the many advantages, these are a few key benefits of running your business with a Google Cloud Partner. With a reseller like InterlockIT, you're not only getting powerful world class collaborative G Suite tools, you're also getting many years of experience providing cloud-consulting, on-going technical support, and domain management. Contact us today to purchase your G Suite subscription with InterlockIT! It's quick, simple, and you'll thank yourself later!

New names & new tricks!

With business demands growing and companies looking to boost productivity, it's equally important for tech tools to evolve and keep up the pace. The digitization of businesses in particular makes it necessary for modern tools to reinvent/improve upon their predecessors. We hear our customers with different requirements calling for more refined products to be offered. So far, Google has delivered and maintains it's superiority over other 'cloud' platforms with its frequent updates.

Google Apps is the backbone of millions of companies across the globe. The cloud apps are not standalone apps, but rather a complete suite of intelligent applications that work harmoniously to provide users with an exceptionally fluid and seamless collaborative experience. Not only does Google continue to improve usability and features, but they've gone so far as to update the name of their applications to better reflect their mission; for technology to live up to its promise for us at work and help us cut through the noise so we can work together and focus on what matters. Just last week Google introduced 'G Suite' (formerly known as Google Apps for Work).

Google Apps is now G Suite Basic. 

Google Apps Unlimited is now G Suite Business. 

Since Google frequently introduces new features to their already robust applications, they've introduced yet another great element, and this time to Google Drive; Team Drives.  

In 2012, Google Drive launched to bring all of your work to all of your devices. Today, Drive sits on more than one billion smartphones and as businesses embrace it, a new key need has emerged: teams. We all know that teams need to move fast, be scaleable, and regroup. In order to keep up, Team Drives redefine this model, shifting the focus from individual users to teams. For example, content ownership and sharing can now be managed at the team level, and new roles give more granular control over team content. As the G Suite Updates blog states, "Team Drives help streamline teamwork from end-to-end, from onboarding a new team member (add her to the team and she instantly has access to all of the work in one place) to offboarding a departing team member (remove him from the team and all of his work stays right in place), and everything in-between". Team Drives will be exclusive to G Suite Business users and will begin rolling out to customers through the Early Adoption Program. 

Although these are incremental updates, they have a profound impact on the way we conduct business in teams. If you're looking for an exceptional suite of business productivity apps, unlimited cloud storage, e-discovery, archiving, Team Drives and much much more, G Suite Business is your solution. Get in touch with us today to assist your ascendance to the tech Cloud. Our G Suite deployment specialists are ready to lead and assist your implementation. 

Pokémon Go Technology

Technology is evolving rapidly and games are no longer restricted to a controller and screen in your living room. They're now physically and socially engaging, like Pokémon GO from nainticlabs.com.

Pokémon GO is an augmented-reality game that blends imagination, exercise, and real-world exploration all around you. The idea of 'catching' Pokémon has never been more realistic. Millions of people of all ages are spending more time outdoors trying to catch the globally scattered virtual critters. Just in the last nine weeks, Pokémon GO surpassed half a billion downloads worldwide and players have collectively walked 4.6 billion kilometers - that's the distance from Earth to Pluto! Pokémon GO continues to grow in popularity as developers expand on its features.

At Interlock IT, we've split into our respective teams and have some serious Pokémon trainers! The game is tons of fun and has us actively participating, but what really interests us is how the game is able to function so well with so much server load and usage. What platform is the game running on and how is it scaling so well? The short answer; Google.

Niantic's job postings require applicants to have experience with Google's Cloud Platform and be "extremely proficient with Google App Engine". It's no surprise, John Hanke's (CEO of Niantic), had previously established a similar and very popular Android-based game known as Ingress. Ingress uses Google's Cloud Platform as its backend. The same technologies and map-points were used to lay the foundations of Pokémon GO which allows for massive scalability and in return, enables a progressively stable gaming experience for users. Check out this Google Cloud Platform blog post to learn about the infrastructure that helped bring Pokémon GO to life for millions of players.

Google allows 'game-changing' games (pun intended), the likes of Pokémon GO and Ingress to have their databases storing massive amounts of geodata for determining where people congregate, how much movement they are doing, and all of the places where Pokémon should regenerate, into highly scalable servers. Google understands the cloud extremely well and knows the future of computing lies in the clouds. The sheer scale and ambition of these games needed Niantic to tap into Google's cloud utilities to make it a reality. With so many people playing the games worldwide, it's another tribute to Google's incredible cloud platform.

What was once a sci-fi dream of having full access to business and pleasure, anywhere at anytime, has now become a reality. Pokémon GO not only illustrates the importance of having a solid backend infrastructure, but testifies the power and reliability of Google's servers. It's fast, scalable, and secure. Contact us today to upgrade your business to Google's cloud platform. It's GO time!

The best cloud accounting solution for small businesses!

Nowadays, having a reliable IT system in place is imperative for an efficient business workflow. As cloud experts, we've found early on that cloud computing is an integral part of having your IT system work for you, and not the other way around. Cloud email, cloud collaboration, cloud storage, and even cloud accounting are what make up a powerful, productive, and efficient IT system.

Although our founder has a deep passion for wielding cloud technology, by trade he is a Chartered Professional Accountant and a Certified Management Accountant. Both technology and accounting overlap in our world and we're often asked this question; what is the best cloud accounting solution for small and medium sized businesses?

The quickest answer; Xero.

As cloud strategists, we find accessibility is key when it comes to data and management. Xero, along with other cloud solutions, is built around the idea of accessibility. Cloud technologies enable everything to work faster and more efficiently. Even large banks and financial institutions are starting to use cloud storage for their data storage needs over their traditional data centers. With cloud accounting software like Xero, small businesses can do everything, including easy invoicing, inventory, multi-currency reconciling, source document attachment, purchase orders, cash-flow management, and much more. The ability to have these features fully accessible, from virtually anywhere, is a huge plus for small and medium sized businesses. Learn more about Xero features here: https://www.xero.com/ca/accounting-software/

Xero has been at the forefront of cloud accounting for a very long time. It's one of the easiest online accounting systems and offers great convenience for its users without compromising on key features that are normally found in legacy accounting software. It has become one of the fastest growing cloud accounting companies in the world, with a subscriber base of over 700,000, contributing a total life-time value of $1.5 billion. Their success is due to their loyal small business customers across 180 countries. Xero intelligently takes advantage of cloud technology which allows them to innovate faster than ever before and pushes them into new geographies.

There's no doubt that Xero is well on it's way to hitting the billion dollar annual revenue mark with it's rapid growth, making it a top choice for those looking for the perfect cloud accounting solution. Interlock IT is a Certified Xero Partner and a Certified Xero Development Partner. We'll make your transition to Xero painless and can even assist you with custom Xero reports and integrations. Give us a call and let us know what you're looking to do with Xero. We're more than happy to assist! We'll even provide a free Xero trial account; just fill out our contact us form and mention this post in the comments.

If you've adopted Google Apps for Work, we've created Blink Reports for Xero. Blink Reports is the only Google Sheets add-on that allows Xero customers to build financial reports, charts, and virtual dashboards connected to your live Xero data. Contact us today to discuss with us your cloud accounting needs!

Fastest way to login securely (no password needed!) - Google Prompt

Everyone uses passwords, but sometimes even passwords aren't enough to prevent security breaches. Quickly adopted by millions of users, Google introduced an added measure of securing email and data, known as 2-Step Verification. We've written a dedicated post about it here: http://blog.interlockit.com/2015/03/two-step-verification-added-layer-of.html. It's a great way to ensure your emails and documents are safe, but requires you to retrieve a code via text or Google's Authenticator app which you then have to enter, every 30 days if you so choose.

There's an easier way now; Google Prompt. Instead of typing in your password each time you sign in to your Google Account, you can get a prompt sent to your phone. Simply, tap the notification from Google to confirm, and you'll be signed in quickly and securely.

You'll need an iPhone 5S and up or an Android device for Google Prompt to work. Setting it up is a piece of cake:

1. On your computer or tablet, go to the "Sign in & security" section of My Account. You might need to sign in to your Google Account.
2. In the "Tired of typing passwords?" box, select Get started.
3. Select Set it up, then sign in to your account. You'll be taken to a guided setup process.
4. In the "Your phone" section, choose which phone you want to use to sign in.
5. Turn on your device's security feature.
   • Android: If there isn't a check next to "Screen lock," select Add a screen lock and follow the onscreen instructions.
   • iPhone: If there isn't a check next to "Touch ID," select How to set it up and follow the onscreen instructions.
6. Choose Next.
7. Below your username, select Next to practice how you'll sign in.
8. On your phone, follow the onscreen instructions to see Google's prompt, then tap Yes.
9. On your computer or tablet, select Turn on to the finish setup.

That's it! Now whenever you attempt to sign in to your Google Account, you'll get a "Trying to sign in?" prompt sent to your phone, just tap Yes and you're in!

Google understands security doesn't have to be tedious and Google Prompt makes for a quick and effortless way to access your account while maintaining a higher level of security than your average password. Contact our Interlock IT team today to secure your precious data with Google Apps!

The Cloud Powerhouse

We like to think cloud-technology users understand the power and security Google Apps can bring to their daily workflow. As industries evolve, so do the trends in user interaction with technology. Cloud adopters understand that IT systems don't have to be complicated, difficult, and expensive. Solutions like Google Apps empowers companies to grow at unforeseen heights and we find cloud adoption increasing more than ever, especially in fast-growing companies and startups.

Interlock IT recently had the pleasure of leading a Google Apps implementation for Imaginea Energy - a Calgary based oil and gas company. As Imaginea grew, they recognized their legacy storage, productivity, and email tools didn't reflect their open and transparent culture. Their closed environment made it difficult to collaborate together beyond very small teams so they started to look for a solution that was robust and powerful enough to mirror their vision. Google Apps for Work was their answer.

Within as little as four weeks, Interlock IT helped Imaginea Energy migrate email to Google Apps and transform into a highly productive and collaborative workplace. Flexibility to work remotely also allowed their employees maximum autonomy. Collaboration became seamless with Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Forms. Working offline became a possibility with immediate syncing upon network connectivity and Google Hangouts saved significant travel costs, enabling teams to spend more time on-site and less time driving. Since the implementation, Imaginea has become unstoppable and continues to grow rapidly.

Interlock IT loves saving customers the headaches and costs that accompany clunky outdated non-cloud platforms, and as anticipated, Imaginea was able to cut their IT costs in half! Interlock IT helped strategize the move of their legacy oil and gas applications from their traditional on-premise Windows servers to virtualized Windows servers on Google's Cloud Platform. Just see what Greg Bennett from Imaginea had to say, "At Imaginea, we defy industry stereotypes by focusing on Planet, People and Profit together. When you set out to reimagine an industry like oil and gas, achieving that vision is only possible with the right people and the right tools. The Interlock IT team led us through a smooth transition to a powerful, cost-effective, and secure collaboration suite. With Google Apps, we’ve set course to truly transform our business and the energy industry." Be sure to check out Greg's full blog post on the official Google for Work blog.

In recent years, the use of Google Apps has been growing steadily and capturing large chunks of the market. Businesses as well as consumers are increasingly considering Google Apps for meeting their productivity and collaboration needs. It's no secret that the markets are flocking to Google Apps and chances are that even your business or organization already uses at least one cloud-based application. Why not give Google Apps a try? As cloud experts, we've witnessed the repeated success of companies that embrace the Google platform. Industries ranging from energy to education and beyond are aware of the potential Google Apps brings to their respective trade. Contact Interlock IT today to learn how Google Apps can revolutionize your business workflow!

Cliniko to Xero Integration

The Cloud! It's the much needed, efficient, and cost-effective upgrade to your obsolete IT infrastructure. If you're a business that understands the importance of having a solid IT system, you'll definitely appreciate the wonders and advantages of cloud-computing. At Interlock IT we pride ourselves in promoting cloud solutions and even cater to our customers need's for custom integrated solutions. You can think of us as a marriage counselor for your cloud products that need more out of their relationship.

Having a professional accountant (CPA, CMA) as our founder, it's only natural for our team to delve into cloud-based accounting software. Xero, for example, is an accounting software that helps you see your cash flow in real-time, has online accounting, banking, and payroll features.

We think Xero is a superior solution to Quickbooks and Quickbooks Online. Xero's massive growth, adding over 242,000 subscribers over the last year, speaks for itself. As of March 2016 Xero has 717,000 subscribers worldwide. You can learn more about Xero on their website.

Cliniko is another web-based product used by thousands of healthcare practitioners in more than 55 countries worldwide. Cliniko helps manage your schedule, treatment notes, invoices, payments, and much more. It works great for solo practitioners, large teams, and anything in between. You can learn more about Cliniko on their website.

Cliniko and Xero; it's a good combination and Cliniko even offers it's own step-by-step integration guide to Xero. However, the integration falls short in a number of areas. We (Interlock IT) can make up for that! For example, the Cliniko provided integration to Xero Accounting can only map one Cliniko instance to one Xero Accounting organization. It also does not support Xero Tracking Categories for splitting revenue and costs by Cliniko location or business within a Xero organization. We support both situations. We’re flexible and happy to discuss sharing the software development costs of meeting other unique needs such as batching payments by day.

Be sure to contact us! Our team of experts is here to make sure you get the most out of your solutions because we understand it's so much easier when everything is connected!