How to save money and delay the G Suite price increase

On January 16th, 2019 Google Cloud Announced price increases that will take effect April 2nd, 2019.

Organizations currently purchasing G Suite Basic for $50 on an annual plan in USD are facing a 44% price increase effective April 2nd, 2019.

The new prices in U.S. Dollars (USD) and Canadian Dollars (CAD) are below:

G Suite Edition	USD (per user/month)	CAD (per user/month)
Basic	$6	$7.80
Business	$12	$15.60
Enterprise	$25	$34.00

If your organization is currently buying G Suite Basic or Business Edition directly from Google on a monthly Flex plan you can switch to an Annual subscription through us at Interlockit.com before the price increase date and keep the old pricing for 1 whole year!

In addition, if your G Suite plan with Google direct is an annual commitment, switching to us at Interlockit.com as your partner will reset the annual contract start date to the date of the transfer letting you keep the old pricing for another year!

The potential savings of resetting your contract date are huge and there is zero interruption to your G Suite service. It's just a back end billing change. You are never locked in and can return to buying direct from Google after the 1 year is up but we expect you'll enjoy our excellent G Suite technical support team and stay on board with us.

Another great way to reset your contract date and lock in the savings is to upgrade to G Suite for Business Edition at the current $10/user/month or $120/user/year price on an annual contract. Your annual Basic contract gets terminated on the day of the upgrade effective resetting your term and locking in the old pricing for 1 year. Click here for the G Suite editions overview and a detailed comparison. G Suite Business with Team Drives and Unlimited Storage is giving our customers freedom from traditional Windows file shares and other non-integrated, non-cloud storage solutions.

Currently G Suite Basic on an annual plan is $50/user/year and G Suite Business is $120/user/year. These prices will increase to $72/user/year and $144/user/year respectively on April 2, 2019

Interlockit.com can save you $22 USD/user on Basic and $24 USD/user on Business Edition for 1 year. The savings on Canadian Dollar (CAD) G Suite plans can be even higher!

Contact us at Interlockit.com to learn more about what your cost savings could be.

Google Introduces Work Insights and the Investigation Tool

Have you ever wondered if your G Suite subscription is actually being put to good use?

Work Insights is a new tool to that lets you see how much impact G Suite is making on your organization. It does this by showing you data on which teams are using G Suite and which apps they use frequently, how they are using the apps to collaborate, how much time the teams are spending in meetings, and much more. Essentially, Work Insights gives you an overview of how G Suite enables your team members to work together.

Photo source: G Suite Updates Blog

Admins can look at adoption charts in Work Insights to analyze trends and track deployment progress. This data is useful for bench-marking and for identifying which team members may need additional training on applications. This can be especially relevant if your organization is shifting from legacy tools to G Suite.

Photo source: G Suite Updates Blog

Currently in beta, Work Insights is available to organizations subscribed to G Suite Enterprise or Enterprise for Education. G Suite admins who want to try it now can fill out the Beta Test Application form.

Are you aware of potential security risks within your G Suite domain?

Google understands every organization's need for simplified security management. The security center, which they introduced earlier this year, brings together security analytics, actionable insights, and best practice recommendations. Recently, they announced the general availability of the new investigation tool which integrates remediation to the prevention and detection features of the security center. G Suite admins can use the new investigation tool to identify suspicious device activity, find out if classified Google Drive documents have been shared to outsiders and hence cut access, remove emails that can compromise account security, and more.

Photo source: G Suite Updates Blog

The investigation tool has a simple user interface. Admins can identify threats and take action with a few clicks--no need to analyze logs or run complex scripts.

The investigation tool is now available to G Suite Enterprise customers.

References

Gain deeper organizational insights and take action with new G Suite features [Web blog post]. (2018, September 18). Retrieved September 23, 2018, from https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2018/09/gain-deeper-organizational-insights-and.html

Sawers, P. (2018, September 18). G Suite’s new Work Insights tool reveals adoption and collaboration rates within your company [Web blog post]. Retrieved September 23, 2018, from https://venturebeat.com/2018/09/18/g-suites-new-work-insights-tool-reveals-adoption-rates-and-collaboration-within-your-company/

The power of cloud integration for business IT systems

Before cloud computing existed, data used to reside in individual stores, on different computers, and sometimes within very different ecosystems. Users would have a record for a client in accounting, another in the order entry system, and another in a database of leads. Even emails were hosted on individual machines with only a local access point. To make matters even more complicated, none of these systems would automatically synchronize or intercommunicate; it was a virtual mess!

Thankfully many business systems today operate in the cloud allowing users to, for example, pull emails from a customer relationship management (CRM) system (like Copper) and with a single click, dial a contact via RingCentral which logs the interaction for productivity reporting and follow ups. Since data now has the ability to flow freely between software, it doesn't make sense for it to live in individual stores any longer. Think of software integration like bridges in a city, allowing traffic to flow freely from one place to another.

Our team at Interlock IT advocates a simplified workflow which eases integration between all of your business systems – phone, email, and software. For instance, allowing calls to be logged in your CRM both in and out of the office, and emails automatically synced to client records in your CRM and accounting software. Our skilled team can perform custom integrations with many other solutions that we may not necessarily resell. Our use of Google App Engine instead of hosted servers and the pervasiveness of modern Open API's with cloud software means integrations are low cost, secure, reliable, and near realtime. Gone are the error prone days of file exports to hard drives and batch import processes that frequently failed due to data structure changes. Modern API's flow through the software business logic layer to prevent issues like posting unbalanced accounting entries. Database or file level integration methods of the past often required duplication of this critical error checking logic and would fall behind as the core software business logic changed.

To illustrate an example of cloud integration, we use Hubdoc to automatically push our monthly phone bill to Xero which codes it to the correct expense account. It attaches the pdf image of the invoice and also saves a copy to our Google Drive where we can take advantage of the world's best search engine to instantly find it again. Enabling auto-pay with our provider allows us to simply let Xero's automatic downloading of bank transactions find the matching payment and mark it as paid. There is zero traditional human data entry required, which in return allows us to use that time towards more important tasks like following up with our customers.

Unfortunately many businesses still use obsolete (non-cloud) IT software that is inherently inefficient and expensive. Even custom integrations of legacy software is generally designed hastily to fill a need but isn't a permanent fix. This usually involves data that is only accessible from one computer and often by only one user at a time, not remotely and collaboratively. In the era of cloud computing, these sort of 'patch-ups' aren't necessary. Cloud computing has opened the doors for powerful software integrations that yield far superior results when it comes to productivity and efficiency. If there's a cloud application that your business needs to integrate, our team is ready to design and deploy it. Contact us today to find out more about how you can unify your workflow and improve your business IT system!

Fluidly Send Mails in Gmail By Mentioning Your Contact With The @ Symbol

If you're used to tagging your friends on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram by typing @ + <your friend's name>, then surely you'll like this new feature in the New Gmail. When writing an email, you can mention your contact by typing the @ symbol and then the name of your correspondent in the body of the email.

Gmail will show a list of contacts as you type the name, and you can use the Up or Down arrow key and hit Enter to select the contact. The name will appear as a hyperlinked text in the body of the message and populate the To: field.

This trick only works with people you've already contacted, and only in the New Gmail interface. It's still a helpful feature nevertheless.

G Suite admins can enable the New Gmail in the Admin Console:

1. Go to Apps > G Suite > Gmail.
2. Under User settings, scroll down to "New Gmail Early Adopter Program" and select "Allow my users access to the new Gmail UI and features".
3. Save.

G Suite users and regular Gmail users can opt in on the feature by clicking on the gear icon in their mailbox and then choosing the option "Try the new [Yourdomainname] Mail" or "Try the new Gmail".

If you spend your time mostly on writing emails, then this cool feature should allow you to be more productive. Go ahead, try it now!