The road to G Suite - A quick overview of the transition

G Suite offers many advantages as a professional productivity suite. Some notable ones are collaboration, uniformity, integration to other platforms, ease of access, and ease of use. This post aims to highlight some of these advantages and keys to establishing a successful implementation. Administrators and pilot users are certainly familiar with the time and effort it takes to teach end users a new software. Thanks to Google's focus on usability and user experience, G Suite is one of the easiest productivity suites to learn.

Globally welcomed and renowned, Google's software has become widely used and accepted by businesses and consumers alike. With over 1 billion monthly active Gmail users, folks have been exposed to at least one other Google product, such as Drive, Calendar, or Hangouts. Even if you haven't used many of the applications, just being exposed to them gives you a baseline of familiarity and eases the learning process. It's also very likely that your end users may already be using G Suite applications like Docs, which means they probably require minimal user training and can focus on more important tasks.

We live in a fast-paced business world which requires us to have tools that are easily accessible. Unfortunately many end users still believe business software can only be accessible on one specific platform and on one specific device at a time - those days are long gone! Google understands access needs vary from user to user. Some prefer a specific OS (Windows, Mac, or Android) and others prefer a specific device such as a laptop, desktop, or tablet. Because G Suite is cloud based and cross platform efficient, it can be accessed from any user’s preferred software and hardware configuration. Undeniably a familiar environment helps speed up the learning and work process.

Although G Suite is easy to use we sometimes find end users to still be mildly resistant to change as they're already comfortable with their current workflow. To ease the process, we recommend the following:

Make the announcement: of course it's best to let everyone know that changes will be occurring to improve their workflow and performance. Consider having the changeover announcement made by a high ranking person in the organization to help ensure users read their communication instead of just deleting it. Announcement of the change will collectively get the team aware and curious of what's to come.

Prepare for the change: implementation of a new platform brings with it some challenges and is not a short term matter. For example, changes to company policies may occur as the team gains access to the plethora of G Suite features. In order to ease user concerns, we recommend gradual adoption. There should be a clear plan for what changes to policy and workflow are needed over a clearly defined time frame. A well planned and communicated migration helps make transitioning easier on both your IT staff and your end users.

Educate everyone: hesitation should be expected and worked with. As mentioned before, many end users already have familiarity with and use Google products in their personal lives. Leverage this into showing them all the benefits G Suite has to offer. Organize training around teams with users that encourage learning on their own by using the system. InterlockIT provides in depth training on all G Suite products - get in touch here. Consider the advantage of G Suite’s cross platform capacity by allowing users to learn on hardware/software that they're comfortable with (if this is applicable) as it can quicken the learning process. We recommend Google's Chromebook to simplify workflow and easily administer your team.

It's understood that transitioning to a new productivity platform brings with it challenges that have to be properly addressed, but by putting user concerns at ease, having proper training, and a clear plan of action for implementation, your switch to G Suite should go smoothly and be viewed as an opportunity to grow and streamline your workflow. To learn more about migration services and G Suite deployment, contact our InterlockIT team today!

Machine learning in G Suite - How it increases productivity

Humans have been evolving rapidly over the last few centuries; from the agricultural age, to the industrial age, to now the information age. As we evolve so do our tools and the ways we interact with them. Take G Suite for example. Just over the last few years, G Suite has evolved from more than just an email and contacts solution, it now has the capacity to anticipate your business needs and facilitate collaboration and productivity at an unprecedented level.

Formatting documents, email management, and creating expense reports. These are just a few of the common time-consuming tasks that negatively affect productivity. Time spent working on tasks that do not directly relate to a creative output is costly and is referred to as 'overhead'. Unfortunately, huge overhead is common in most businesses and hinders valuable potential. According to a study by Google in 2015, the average worker spent roughly 5 percent of their time actually coming up with the next big idea. The remaining 95 percent of the time was dissolved in the form of formatting, tracking, analysis or other mundane tasks. With all these tools and efficiencies, one would think the percentages would be reversed. To make this possible, Google introduced what's known as machine learning.

What is machine learning? Essentially, machine learning algorithms observe input examples and make output predictions based on data. In G Suite, machine learning makes your workday more efficient by handling menial tasks, like scheduling meetings, or by predicting information you might need and surfacing it for you, like suggesting Docs for example.

Ever notice how you received less and less spam over the years with Gmail? One of the first applications to use machine learning was Gmail. Historically, Gmail used a rule-based system, meaning Google's anti-spam team would create new rules to match individual spam patterns. With over a decade worth of data and using this process, Gmail improved it's spam detection accuracy to 99%! It's now one of the most secure and spam free email applications in the world. To take it a step further, in 2014 Google augmented the rule-based system to generate rules using machine learning algorithms instead. This took spam detection to another level which now allows Gmail to continually regenerate the “spam filter”, so systems learn to predict which emails are most likely junk. Naturally, machine learning finds new patterns and adapts more quickly than previous manual systems - it’s a great reason for why there are more than one billion monthly active Gmail users today!

The goal of G Suite is to help teams accomplish more with an intelligent range of applications, no matter where they are in the world. Smart Reply for example, uses machine learning to generate three natural language responses to an email. If you find yourself away from the office or time-restricted and are in need of a quick way to clear your inbox,  you can let Smart Reply do it for you. Click here to learn more about Smart Reply.

Explore in Docs, Slides and Sheets uses machine learning to eliminate time spent on things like tracking down documents or information on the web, reformatting presentations or performing calculations within spreadsheets. The whole point of these tools is to help the user accomplish more with less.

Another great example of machine learning is Quick Access in Drive which predicts and suggests files you might need within Drive. Quick Access intelligently predicts files based on who you share files with frequently, when relevant meetings occur within your Calendar, or if you have patterns of using files at specific times of the day. Using predictions based on recent Drive activity greatly increases a users productivity and efficiency for day to day work.

To learn more about how machine intelligence can make work easier, check out this video from Google Cloud Next with Ryan Tabone, director of product management at Google, where he explains more about “overhead.” G Suite was made to make businesses run faster, smoother, and more efficiently. If those are things you're looking to adopt for your organization, give us a shout! We'd love to hear from you and discuss the possibilities for you business IT solutions.

How to better manage your G Suite domain as an administrator

G Suite is a package of cloud-based services that can provide your organization with an entirely new way to collaborate online. It's more than just email and chat, it provides video conferencing, social media, real-time document collaboration, and a powerful, yet under-rated, administration console for domain-wide management. Unfortunately, many organizations overlook the capabilities of the G Suite admin console. Hopefully this post will shed light on some of these capabilities. Here are a few great ways to better manage your G Suite domain as an administrator:

Add users and manage services in the Google Admin console:

This should be a no-brainer, but to allow folks in your organization to start using G Suite, you must add them to you account first.  To do this, you need to login to your Google Admin console (desktop or mobile). You can also use this console to manage all other aspects of your domain and users, including user services and password resets. 

Add layers of privacy and security:

G Suite includes many important security features that are designed to you company's data safe and protected. You can add additional layers of security to your users' accounts by enabling 2-step verification and enabling anti-spoofing measures to combat email abuse. Here are some security best practices to consider.

Control users' access to services and features:

By default, most services are turned on for all your users, but you can turn off the ones that you don't want users to use, via the admin console. You can even tailor how services work for specific users by applying different policies to different users. For example, you may want to turn on Google Hangouts for your entire sales team or allow only your support department to have 2-step verification.

Switch your business email to Gmail:

By default, users you add to your G Suite domain get an email address at the domain you provided when you created your account. If they're currently using this address with your old mail service, however, you decide when to make the switch. Mail will not start flowing to their Gmail account until the domain's MX records are changed to point to Google servers. Here's how to setup Gmail for your team.

Use a Google Cloud parter for deployment, training, and support:

To ensure a smooth transition to G Suite, Google recommends partners like us (Interlock IT) to provide a rich set of resources. Interlock IT provides end-user training, admin console training, support, and migration services to assist with your rollout. Here's a previous post one why you should use a Google Cloud partner. We also recommend using the G Suite learning centre for quickstart guides, videos, and additional tips. 

Grant admin privileges to your IT staff:

Regardless of the size of your organization, it's recommended that you distribute the responsibility of managing your users and services among a select group of trusted users. You can do this by granting administrator privileges to these users. Users that you have given admin privileges to arrive at the admin console just like you do. In comparison, users who do not have admin privileges do not see an admin console when they sign in, but rather go straight to their list of managed services. 

Manage new feature releases for your users:

Because G Suite is fully cloud-based, you and your users receive new features and updates automatically, without the need to install or update software. Some administrators prefer to know of these updates and want the ability to track upcoming releases. To do this, simply go to the release calendar or G Suite updates blog. You can also control when new features become available to your users by setting up your G Suite release process. 

Manage your mobile users remotely:

You can use the admin console to manage users' mobile devices, enforce security policies, remotely wipe lost/stolen devices, and much more. Here's how to manage your users' mobile devices.

Track usage and trends:

Adoption tracking is important; it's what tells you that your users are actually utilizing the tools available to them. By viewing the usage graphs and reports in your admin console, you can monitor how individual services are being used across your organization. This is a great visual to provide insight and assess your team's use of collaboration, identify unwanted security patterns, and even track other trends.

Add domains for free:

If your organization acquires a new domain name or has multiple domains, you can add all your domains to your account at no additional cost. This allows your users to have multiple identities across one or more of your domains while sharing services as part of single organization.

These are just a few useful things to know about the admin console. It's a highly versatile and capable tool to allow administrators unified control and management. Click here to learn more about the G Suite admin console or get in touch with us today! 

G Suite Series - Hangouts Chat & Meet

Companies understand the pain of hosting meetings with individuals outside their physical office space. Issues like weak signals, faulty plug-ins, and jammed telephone lines are often culprits for a 'less than pleasant' meeting experience.

Google understands this naturally, and innovated a solution. Their most recent update to Google Hangouts split it into two parts; Chat and Meet. Both consist of new features aimed to make the audio and visual communications between users, more convenient and direct. Chat and Meet, in a way, can be looked at as business counterparts to Google's consumer apps, Allo and Duo.

Here's what you need to know about Chat and Meet:

Hangouts Chat
If you're familiar with Slack, this is more or less Google's version of it but with superior conversation threading. Google Chat makes it easier to bring cross-functional teams together, discuss tasks that need to get done, and share collaborative work. It's designed to allow users to create virtual rooms where they can hold group conversations, and even break off into tangential threads. Available soon on Android, iOS, and web, it's perfect for practically anyone, on any device, anywhere.

Chat’s deep integration with G Suite means shared content from Drive and Docs, or photos and videos, can be viewed directly in conversations. It even includes filterable search to make it easy to find content dating back to the start of a project. The Chat platform supports a wide range of capabilities, from bots to simple scripting using Google App Script. It also integrates with third-party applications so teams can do more right from within the conversation. Chat also features @meet, an intelligent bot built on top of the Hangouts platform that uses natural language processing and machine learning to automatically schedule meetings for your team with Hangouts Meet and Google Calendar.

Hangouts Meet
The purpose of Google’s Hangouts Meet is to ease the process of starting a meeting, essentially eliminating the need for plug-ins and sign-ins. It's meant to kick-start a video conference using nothing more than a browser with a shared link, calendar invite, or an ad-hoc share. Unfortunately it's common to find cumbersome perquisites when simply attempting to join a meeting with other video conferencing software. Meet's primary goal is to make joining meetings effortless so that users can be as productive as they are when they're face-to-face.

Hangouts Meet allows up to 30 participants as opposed to only 10 in the earlier Hangouts version. What's even cooler is that with every meeting, a dial-in number containing a PIN code for instant access is provided for a frictionless experience. It's super easy to dial in from a conference room, laptop, or a mobile device using the dedicated app. Meet is available to all G Suite editions, however, the ability to create meetings with a dial-in phone number is only available in the Enterprise tier of G Suite. Here's how to manage meet for you organization and a handy cheat sheet to help you get started.

It's clear that Google is committed to building communication tools focused on the way teams work, from anywhere, at anytime. More than half of the workforce will contribute remotely by 2020, so businesses require purpose-built tools to help their employees succeed. As to why Google decided to evolve Hangouts into 2 solutions, it's probably an aim to deliver an easier approach for the two main entry-points that customers adhere to; collaborative messaging and video meetings.

Click here to see what you can do with the newest features of Hangouts. To learn more about Hangouts Chat or Meet, get in touch with us today!

An easier way to login to G Suite

Google is soon rolling out a noticeable update to your sign-in page to give you an improved experience to securely sign in to your accounts. The purpose of this new design is to make browser sign-in flows consistent across computers, phones and tablets. Here's what it will look like on your desktop:

We find some G Suite users complain about an inconsistent login experience via multiple devices, especially if they aren't using a third party SSO (single sign-on) utility. Google heard the complaints and in addition to the improved aesthetics, the new Google sign-in page will remove the “Stay signed in” checkbox that at certain times appeared for G Suite customers. This checkbox has been the source of much confusion so removing the checkbox will enable users to remain signed in unless they specifically sign out. It's always recommended to use a private browser (incognito) window when using shared or public devices.

Users using a third-party SSO provider to access Google applications, such as Gmail, Calendar, Drive, etc., will not see any differences apart from the newly designed Google Accounts login page.

Users using a third-party SSO provider to access third-party applications will see an additional account selection page when they log in. This page will clarify which account they’re authenticating, as well as the permissions they’re granting to applications. All third-party SSO providers, including Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) SSO, will use the new Google Accounts login process.

All G Suite users will be shown the account selection page, before or after being redirected to the third-party application, depending on whether they’re already signed in to their browser and the specific third-party application they’re accessing. It's important to note that after being prompted to confirm the correct Google account and granting the requested permissions upon initial login, only the account selection page will be shown again upon subsequent login attempts. Existing G Suite users who use Google as their identity provider, will not be affected by the changes and will only see the redesigned Google sign-in page.

Removal of an account from the sign-in page is easy, this can be done from the account selection page by clicking the “Remove an account” link.

Hopefully this will assist in resolving issues for G Suite users on multiple devices and users who use an SSO utility. The update will rollout on Monday, April 10, to a small set of users and will ramp up slowly over the course of several weeks. Additional details about this update can be found on the Google support page.

Get in touch with us today to learn more about G Suite and how it can make your business processes faster, safer, and more efficient!