Google Workspace User Guide

Balaji Iyer, Abhi Jeevaganambi

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781801070683
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Business Intelligence
• Index: Computer Science

Explore the suite of apps that enhance productivity and promote efficient collaboration in your businessKey Features• Set up your own project in Google Workspace and improve your ability to interact with different services• Understand how a combination of options can help businesses audit their data to be highly secure• Deploy Google Workspace, configure users, and migrate data using Google WorkspaceBook DescriptionGoogle Workspace has evolved from individual Google services to a suite of apps that improve productivity and promote efficient collaboration in an enterprise organization.This book takes you through the evolution of Google Workspace, features included in each Workspace edition, and various core services, such as Cloud Identity, Gmail, and Calendar. You'll explore the functionality of each configuration, which will help you make informed decisions for your organization. Later chapters will show you how to implement security configurations that are available at different layers of Workspace and also how Workspace meets essential enterprise compliance needs. You'll gain a high-level overview of the core services available in Google Workspace, including Google Apps Script, AppSheet, and Google Cloud Platform. Finally, you'll explore the different tools Google offers when you're adopting Google Cloud and migrating your data from legacy mail servers or on-premises applications over to cloud servers.By the end of this Google Workspace book, you'll be able to successfully deploy Google Workspace, configure users, and migrate data, thereby helping with cloud adoption.What you will learn• Manage and configure users in your organization's Workspace account• Protect email messages from phishing attacks• Explore how to restrict or allow certain Marketplace apps for your users• Manage all endpoints connecting to Google Workspace• Understand the differences between Marketplace apps and add-ons that access Drive data• Manage devices to keep your organization's data secure• Migrate to Google Workspace from existing enterprise collaboration toolsWho this book is forThis book is for admins as well as home users, business users, and power users looking to improve their efficiency while using Google Workspace. Basic knowledge of using Google Workspace services is assumed.

Part 1: Getting Started – Google Workspace

The objective of this part is to familiarize readers with Google Workspace and its services. This section will provide a high-level overview of the different products and services and will also give a brief introduction to its capabilities. 

This part comprises the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, Introducing Google Workspace
• Chapter 2, Configuring Users and Apps

Chapter 1: Introducing Google Workspace

When running any business, whether it's a small start-up or a large enterprise with hundreds of thousands of employees, communication tools can allow effective collaboration and ensure the success of the company. Because the recent COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the transition from in-person to remote work, there is more need than ever for a highly available, secure, and agile productivity suite. This new work environment has created a demand for an ecosystem of tools that team members can leverage to streamline their communication and collaboration. This book is about one of the most popular web-based productivity suites available today: Google Workspace.

Google Workspace is a collection of software as a service (SaaS)-based productivity and collaboration tools developed and marketed by Google.

In this chapter, we will give a brief overview of Google Workspace and how it came into being. This chapter will also introduce you to core services that exist in the Google Workspace portfolio. We will also learn about different Google Workspace editions and the differences between their offerings.

We will cover the following main topics:

• The evolution of Google Workspace
• Google Workspace editions
• Google Workspace licensing models
• Domain host versus Google Workspace

The evolution of Google Workspace

As you may know, a productivity suite is a set of applications that includes apps for content management, writing documentation, processing voluminous data, communicating with your team members, and more. Traditionally, these applications were only available on desktops. However, several are now available as web applications that will let you connect from any device, anywhere. This model of distributing software – where a cloud provider hosts applications and makes them available to end users over the internet – is known as SaaS.

The market for SaaS-based productivity suites has grown steadily over the years, with big tech leading the way. After desktop-based productivity suites dominated the market for over two decades, companies started to understand their limitations for an evolving workforce. Desktop-based applications restrict users to specific computers, offering limited capabilities in terms of file sharing and real-time collaboration functionality. Overall, these may limit your work environment, and employees may feel siloed and frustrated.

In the not-so-distant past, imagine how a document may have been shared using one of these common ways:

• The document could have been saved and sent as an email attachment.
• The document could have been copied to a shared directory on the corporate network file system.
• The document could have been copied to a portable drive and physically handed to another user who required it.

Today, with business happening at the speed of light, all of these options are not scalable. For example, emails would frequently fail when email servers rejected attachments for being too large. Files had to be compressed before they could be sent, only for the recipient to receive a corrupted version on the other end.

Thankfully, those days are well behind us due to the power of the internet and the proliferation of cloud technologies.

Google is a pioneer and an internet-first company that started building scalable platforms that pushed people out of the comfort of their desktops. By the early 2000s, Google had established itself as the most popular search engine, and the breakthrough moment for collaboration tools can be traced back to April 1, 2004. If a product was launched on April 1 these days, people would rub it off as an April fools' joke. However, this product garnered enough attention and adoption that it spawned a whole new generation of ecosystems around SaaS-based applications.

Gmail

Gmail revolutionized how people used email. With its intuitive inbox powered by Google search technology, 500x more storage than its competitors, and its quirky features (such as 1 GB mail storage to begin with, labels instead of conventional folders, and a search embedded inbox), Gmail blew away its competition. Gmail also focused on reliability and security, which began to make users comfortable with the SaaS model.

Gmail had several features that were light-years ahead of the competition that also spawned a new generation of web technologies. For instance, email conversations were not always sorted by time; instead, they were grouped by conversations, which made navigating them very intuitive for users. The way Gmail was able to achieve this was through the liberal use of JavaScript and also using the asynchronous loading of web pages. This technology increased in popularity and became known as Ajax, and it enabled Gmail to provide a very intuitive conversation-style inbox, which was fundamentally different from how other email providers operated. Microsoft Hotmail, for instance, was entirely built on HTML and required the user to reload the entire page before an action could be performed.

Google Docs and Google Drive

Buoyed by the success of Gmail, Google started building several SaaS applications that mimicked and replaced several desktop applications. The journey has not been easy, and true to its trial-and-error style, Google experimented with different product launches and had to sunset several products rapidly that did not meet its business standards.

Through a series of acquisitions, Google pulled together the Google Docs platform around 2007. Google Docs allows users to create and edit documents online while collaborating with other users in real time. This marked the beginning of SaaS-based office productivity tools coming together.

As content creation and management exploded over the years, the need for storing huge amounts of data and making it shareable became ubiquitous. As a natural step in the evolution of Google Docs, Google ...

Table of contents

• Google Workspace User Guide
• Foreword
• Preface
• Part 1: Getting Started – Google Workspace
• Chapter 1: Introducing Google Workspace
• Chapter 2: Configuring Users and Apps
• Part 2: Data Security
• Chapter 3: Application Security
• Chapter 4: Automated Security Auditing
• Part 3: Data Integrations
• Chapter 5: Beyond Workspace
• Chapter 6: Designing Custom Applications
• Part 4: Migrating Data
• Chapter 7: Data Migration
• Business Case Studies
• Other Books You May Enjoy