Experience using Google Apps for Business

Each company at a certain stage of development is faced with the question of organizing and subsequent automation of its workflow. We want to share our experience using Google solutions - Drive (Docs), Calendar and Contacts.



This is what we had some time ago - our initial positions, so to speak:

• Own mail and jabber-servers, perfectly and smoothly working, Task Tracker Redmine for developers, wiki for documenting the development;
• Each employee has a personal Google account;
• All managers and managers have a bunch of google docs, somehow shared within the company among colleagues;
• The most responsible ones also have a calendar and organized working contacts in their google account.

For a while, everything worked this way, which suited almost everyone. But there were more employees, even more workflows, and we realized that we were at a dead end — it took too much time and nerves to support the secondary, supporting work.

Our work encountered typical problems (in order of decreasing importance):

1. We can not find the document, although it was definitely;
2. We write the text "from scratch", although such a text has already been written before (it follows from paragraph 1);
3. The employee leaves us, and we must accept his documents and close his access. It happens rarely, but when it happens, there are a lot of worries at once;
4. To have contact information of clients / partners (more precisely, the data of their many employees, since our partners are mostly large organizations) in the public domain;
5. We need a corporate calendar with a schedule of events, meetings, etc., accessible to all;
6. And I also wanted to work with all this comfortably from smartphones and tablets.

As you can see, the main problems were related to the joint work with documents. Why Google Docs, not wiki, you ask? Three main points:

• You can simultaneously edit the document, seeing the edits of each other in real time;
• You can conveniently provide access to a person outside the company;
• WYSIWYG and more understandable conversion to doc / pdf.

Since we have already worked closely with Google products, we decided to try Google Apps for business to solve these problems. We registered our domain, opened accounts for volunteer experimenters, and started working in a free 30-day mode.
We agreed to pay $ 5 per account for each employee, but this is what we found out in the process:

1. General storage of documents and files. Even with the mode in which documents are available to all users of the domain, documents of other users of the domain are not visible in the list. In general, no “list of documents” simply does not exist. The created document can be found either by direct link or by searching (and, explicitly indicating that the search will be within the domain). All the same applies to files (Google Drive). Minus;
2. Mobile version. We were counting on cool support for mobile platforms (Android and iOS), and it really is. All the main elements of Google Apps (Mail, Docs, Disk, Calendar, etc.) are in the form of applications on mobile and implement all or almost all the functionality compared to the desktop web version. Plus (however, with p. 1 problems are the same);
3. From the admin panel, in a few clicks you can transfer ownership of files from one account to another. In the free version, only the document owner could do this, and one document at a time. A plus;
4. Work with multiple accounts. Due to the fact that no one planned to give up personal accounts, support for working with multiple accounts was needed. In applications for Android and iOS, this is implemented by simply switching to the application menu (for Gmail, Drive and others). But there were difficulties with the constant switching of accounts in the desktop version in the browser. To work in Google Drive you have to completely log out and log in again. Plus or minus;
5. Shared address book. Only those users that we have registered in the domain are displayed in the contact list. In fact, this is not an address book, but a list of users (your employees) with contact details. You cannot add a person to it without creating an account in the domain. Minus plus;
6. However, you can delegate your contacts to one or more users from the domain. It turned out that the employee has his contacts, he has to delegate them to someone else, moreover, to delegate everything, although only some are needed. Very confusing. Minus;
7. The calendar. A quick preview showed that each user has the opportunity to create personal calendars, i.e. There are no differences from the free version. (therefore not appreciated).

Weighing all the pros and cons, we realized that Google Apps for business doesn’t provide practically anything useful for solving our problems.
')
Therefore, we thought a bit and did this:

• We got a special Google account for storing and managing documents. The password from the account was given to key employees;
• We created a user group in Google Groups, which included personal manager accounts. Now we just need to give access to the group and all managers in personal accounts can edit the documents that are now displayed in the “Available to me” tab. We opened access not only for files, but also for folders - and everything turned out structured;
• In order to create a new corporate document, simply create it in your personal account and make the owner of the document a shared account;
• Contacts are maintained in our personal account by our responsible employee and exported to all other employees within the necessary contact groups .;
• Under the corporate account we created a calendar, access to which we gave to all the right people.

And that's what they got:

• We can quickly search for documents using the search and on the “Available to me” tab.
• We don’t write texts from scratch any more - everything is organized in the Drive structure of the general account;
• If you need to remove access, we simply remove the user from the group, and he loses access to the documents;
• We use the calendar to organize meetings;
• At the hands of each employee he needs a list of contacts;
• And we can work with all this from smartphones and tablets.

Thus, we managed to implement all the necessary functionality using free solutions from Google, without resorting to Apps for business. And if you decide to use the described approach, then do not forget about the backup data - Google does not make any guarantees.