Experience with Google Apps for Business
This is what we had had for some time – our initial situations, so to speak:
Having mail and jabber servers that operate perfectly and gently, Redmine task tracker for developers, Wiki documents development;
Each employee has a personal account on Google. All managers and executives have a set of Google documents, which are somehow shared within the company among colleagues. The most responsible people also evaluate commercial contacts organized in their Google accounts.
For a while, everything was working this way, which fits almost everyone. But there were more employees and even more work procedures, and we realized that we came to a dead end – it took a long time and nerves for secondary work.
In our work, typical problems appeared (in descending order in terms of importance). We could not find the document, although it was definitely.
We wrote the text “from scratch”, although this text has already been written before (after paragraph 1).
An employee leaves us, and we need to accept your documents and close your arrival. It rarely happens, but when it happens, there are many concerns at the same time.
Obtaining the details of communication with clients / partners (more accurately, the data of their many employees, since our partners are mainly large institutions) in the public domain.
We need an institutional calendar that contains a schedule for events, meetings, etc., and is available to everyone. I also wanted to work with all this properly of smartphones and tablets.
As you can see, the main problems were related to work together with documents. Why do you ask Google Docs, not Wiki? Three main points. You can edit the document at the same time, see the other modifications in the actual time.
You can easily give access to someone who is not from the company;
Wysiwyg and more understandable conversion to Doc / PDF.
As we have already worked in close collaboration with Google products, we decided to try Google Apps for Business to solve these problems. We recorded our scope, established reports of the volunteers tested and started working in a 30 -day free position.
We agree to pay $ 5 for each employee account, but here we find out in this process. Common storage for documents and files. Even in the situation where documents are available to all field users, other users’ documents to the field are invisible on the list. In general, there is not simply “list of documents”.
The document created can be found through a direct link or searching (in addition, indicating that the research will be on the field). The same applies to Google Drive. any less;
Mobile version. We used to trust a great support for mobile platforms (Android and iOS), which is already so. All major elements of Google applications (email, documents, disk, calendar, etc.) are available as mobile applications and are executed or almost all or all of them compared to the work area’s web version.
In addition to (however, the problems are the same in paragraph 1);
On the board, you can transfer the property from one account to another with a few clicks. In the free version, only the owner of the document can do this and one document each time. more;
Work with several accounts. Due to the fact that no one planned to reject personal accounts, it was necessary to work to support the work with multiple accounts. In Android and iOS applications, this is simply executed by changing to the application list (for Gmail and Drive and others).
But there was difficulties in the constant exchange of accounts in the release of the work area in the browser. To work on Google Drive, you must completely do and log in again. Excess or less;
General Address Book. The contact list appears only the users we recorded in the field. In fact, this is not an address catalog, but it is a list of users (their employees) with contact details.
You cannot add someone to him without creating an account in the field. Incomplete However, you can delegate your contacts to one or more user. It turns out that the employee has his own contacts, he must delegate to another person, besides delegating everything, although only some of them are needed.
Very confusing. any less; Calendar. Show a quick look that each user has the ability to create personal calendars, ie there is no difference from the free version. (Therefore, we do not reside).
Taking into consideration all the positive and negative points, we realize that Google apps for businesses do nothing useful to solve our problems.
So we thought a little and did it: Create a special Google account to store and manage documents. The account password was given to the main employees;
We created a user group on Google Groups, which included managers’ personal accounts.
It is now enough to give the group access to the group and all managers in personal accounts can edit the documents that are now displayed on the “Available for Me” tab. We open access not only for files but also for folders – it was found that everything is organized; To create a new company document.
It is sufficient to create it in your personal account and make the general account the owner; Contacts are kept in your personal account by our responsible and exported employee to all other staff of the necessary communication groups.
According to the company’s account, we created a calendar, which we gave access to all the right people.
This is what we have:
We can quickly research documents using the search and on the “available” tab.
We have not written more texts from the beginning – everything is organized in the unit structure for a joint account.
If it is necessary to remove access, we simply remove the group user and he loses access to documents. We use the calendar to organize meetings. At hand, each employee has a contact list they need. We can work with all this from smartphones and tablets.
Thus, we were able to do all necessary work using free Google solutions without resorting to business applications. And if you decide to use the prescribed approach, be sure to copy your backup data – Google has no warranty.
