G Suite is now Google Workspace: What you need to know
- Google has renamed G Suite to Google Workspace.
- Workspace offers users the same apps but is more collaborative.
- Google has also expanded the pricing tiers of the product for small and large businesses.
It’s been four years since Google renamed Apps for Work to G Suite. Today the company is renaming G Suite to Google Workspace, largely due to growing work from across the culture, which grew in popularity (or necessarily) in 2020.
Google has been on a branding campaign lately, reviving Google TV for use in its new Chromecast, and retiring its old music service, Play Music, in favor of YouTube Music.
While none of Google’s popular work-oriented apps and tools are going to the cemetery today, it seems Google is hoping to blur the lines between them by introducing more seamless collaboration features and better dissemination of offerings for individuals and businesses. The company believes that Workspace is more than a renaming of G Suite, it is a new unified foundation for its online productivity tools.
Collaborate from anywhere
The key to Google’s new strategy is to build on Gmail’s new rainbow for chat, voice and video calls, as well as content management functions. It calls this the Better Home for Work and is now generally available to all paying Workspace customers.
Better collaboration in the chat room is also important. According to Google, users and guests will be able to create documents in chat rooms in the coming weeks. This feature should lead to better collaboration between people in an organization and outsiders without compromising security or the hassle of setting up meetings.
Other improvements are designed to help users spend as little time on work as possible. Linked files in documents, sheets, and slides can now be previewed in a popup, while more verbose user @mention chips in the text include contact details and contextual actions.
Google promises that further improvements will be made to Workspace’s numerous apps in the coming months.
In addition to the specific advantages for consumers, Google also sees the launch of Workspace as an opportunity to standardize the symbols of its properties. Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Meet get new icons in the company’s four-color scheme. Other apps like Docs and Sheets are also treated similarly.
Google Workspace: Price Tiers
With the rebranding, Workspace now has four price levels for smaller, larger companies and companies.
The $ 4.80 / month Business Starter tier allows up to 100 people to attend meetings with 30GB of storage per user. It now offers the Business Standard tier of $ 9.60 / month, which increases the maximum attendee for the meeting to 150 attendees. It also included meeting recording and 2TB of storage per user. Finally, Business Plus adds 250 users to attendance tracking with 5TB of storage per user and more security options. It costs businesses $ 18 / month.
Note that these are seemingly introductory offers, so it’s likely that price tiers will rise in line with G Suite prices once the new Google service paint wears off.
For those currently part of Google’s G Suite Basic, Business, or Enterprise tiers, Google provides “the time and support it takes to transition to any of these new offerings,” according to its G Suite Updates blog.
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