Google is no longer just a search engine. Nowadays, Google apps are used daily by millions of subscribers for both personal and business. Many of us are familiar with Gmail, Docs, and Drive—all Google apps that we use almost every day. However, you may haven't heard about at least half the rest of the free tools that could be useful for your business.
In this video, we're sharing our top 5 favorite Google apps for work and why we use them.
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To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
Transcription:
So if you're a business owner, and you struggle with getting your tech, right, it's really important to get the right tools for the job. And we use the Google ecosystem, Google's tools, and the whole ecosystem outside of not only Google workspace, but everything else that's included in it is a great way to support the growth of your business. In this section, I'm going to take you through some of my favorite Google tools, and share with you why these reported, why we love them, and how you can get the benefits of using these tools as well. And let's jump straight into it. First of all I want to cover off is Google Chat. And I absolutely love working with Google Chat. It's got a bit of a bad rap, because in the old days, it was Google Hangouts. And Google Hangouts was not really developed very far. But over time, slack caught up and Google have had to put a lot of energy into redeveloping their chat app. And they've done a really excellent job. Now some of the things that I love about Google is you can see here that there's AI tools actually built straight into the chat. And apart from that, there's also Google building in everything into their Gmail, which means that right inside of your Gmail mailbox, you can actually access the chat as well. You can see here, this one is a demo of the meet bot, which connects to people's calendars and can automatically schedule meetings. And I absolutely love that. Now, we use chat for everything in our business where we need to communicate with someone rapidly and instant messaging has a downside. That downside is it's a bit of an interruption station. And so you may choose to use other software and other tools to connect with your team when you've got non urgent communications. But I really love using chat for the, you know, quick, rapid, like, you know, what are we getting for lunch type chatter, either in the office or with a distributed team. My next favorite tool is Google Sites. And we haven't talked about this heaps on the channel recently, we've had to go a little bit of the wayside. But this is an absolutely central tool to the success of our business. Now, we use Google sites for our team to store documents, systems and processes on the way that we run the business. And so these are the checklists in the how tos for how we do things around here. And the point of putting all of these in one place is that we have a digital Standard Operating Procedures Manual for everything that goes on in the business. Now, Google Sites is great for this because it operates a little bit like a wiki in that anyone can edit it that you give permission. And we encourage you if you're a small business to actually let it be open to everyone to edit, because that means that you've got the opportunity for everyone to contribute to building out the systems and processes and documentation of your business. Now, how does this differ to something like Google Drive? Well, think of Google Drive as like your filing cabinet, where you store all your project plans, and your spreadsheets and your budgets and those kinds of things. And maybe your proposals for your customers for as Google Sites is the digital version of a standard operating procedures manual. That's the How to and the information library of your business. Now, that's an important asset, because when you go to grow and scale, and potentially even sell the business one day, you've got all of the intellectual property of the business contained in one place. And of course, when you're onboarding new team members, it's really simple because you just get them hooked straight onto your Google site. And they get the training that they need to get up to speed on everything in their role in the business. We've got more videos on Google Sites, if you search our YouTube channel, and plenty of information on how you can build a business intranet, and help support your team with working through better systems and processes for your business. This is what I want looks like we can see here we've got like a consultants guide. And that's basically the the first week of what someone sees when they come into our business, they're going to go right through the training guide of all the first steps of what you need to learn who you need to know is embedded documents as embedded videos. And that gets them up to speed very, very quickly. Now, one of my next favorites is Google Keep. And I use this every single day of the week, I tend to find myself using this more in my personal life, then in my business life. Because there's not many kind of like sticky notes that I really need inside the business. I more find myself in the business, you know, building strategic plans. And they're the kind of things that I would share in a task system like a sauna with my different team members. But what Google Keep is really great for is your virtual sticky notes. And in my personal life, I use it for recipes. I use it for journals, I use it for saving pictures of receipts or speeding fines, they all go into Google Keep. So I've got a searchable place for all of my little bits and pieces of notes and data that I need for my life. Now Google does optical character recognition on anything that you snap into here. And you can see it's got a nice colorful display, easy to navigate, you can set up labels, and of course, being Google, very prominent up the top they have a search bar to find the information that you need. So what I love about Google Keep is it's a safe and secure way to save sticky notes. Rather than putting them on a note like just sitting on the desktop of your computer which may not be synchronized. It may not be encrypted. And it may be accessible by anyone else who has access to your computer. Google Keep is connected to your Google account. And so if you've got that locked down with a two factor authentication, then no one else is able to access that And we've got other videos on setting up two factor authentication for your Google account. Of course, your connection between your computer. And Google is also encrypted, which gives you another layer of protection to make sure that you are well looked after that. So that's one of my favorites Google Keep. Next up, and don't shoot me for this one, I'm going to go with Google Calendar. And this may seem like a really, really basic one. But let me tell you, if you're still someone who's using Apple calendar, and you're wondering why you're getting synchronization not happening properly, or you're unable to share your calendar with your colleagues, or maybe you haven't yet harnessed the power of Google calendar with group calendars, and automatic declining have, you know, events when you're out of office, and using the features like work hours to let others know when you're available for meetings or not. All of these features really make the calendar an amazingly powerful tool. We also have other tools for actually planning out your year with a yearly planner, using Google Calendar as your base for all of your events. And if you're interested in that, we've got more videos inside our library when you transfer your licensing into it genius. Now, some of the things that you can do with Google calendar is automatically schedule your Google meet meetings for any meetings that you have with your team. And basically, anytime that you schedule a meeting, it's automatically going to create a video meeting link. And with that with one button, you can actually click straight to the meeting from your phone. And I literally use this all day long. Now we've done plenty of videos on Google meet versus zoom and why we recommend using Google meet if your workspace user, check out our channel for some more of those videos. But I can tell you that not having to like you know wait for zoom to connect and dial in and just getting instant access to my meeting with Google meet makes it an absolute cinch. And I don't have anything like the limits of a 40 minute limit on the free plan with zoom. With Google made it lets me record meetings and put them straight into my Google Drive, which I absolutely love. It's absolutely awesome. Now one of Google's hidden secrets, best kept secrets, I would say, is Google jam board. And this is an amazing app that lets you have a digital whiteboard for brainstorming between you and your team. Now you can actually buy a physical jam board there are about 10,000 Australian dollars. And that is a big physical whiteboard, which will actually like sit in your office with you, you can put it on the wall, you can wheel it around. But if you don't quite have the budget for that, then you can just use Google jam board online. And it works in the browser. It also works on your iPad. So if you've got an iPad, or even a phone, you can start getting to work on building out your jams. And we really love this for collaboration with our team, particularly when we're doing collaborative team activities with a remote team or working in individual different locations. And you can see here, some of the things that our team has set up. Here, they're brainstorming out something for Google Data Studio telling a little bit of a story there. And they're really going to town with the art there absolutely love that. You can see here, this is one of our This is one of our our culture sessions that we did. And so we use this a lot for when we're bringing together our team and we want to bring them together on our strategy. Now it should go without saying that if you're a business owner, you should be using Google workspace. This is Google suite of collaboration tools for everything small business, file storage, communication, collaboration, security, connection with your team policies, and all in one place to be able to connect and communicate, collaborate with your team effectively. Now we are the number one partner for Australia and New Zealand for Google workspace. And we've helped literally 1000s of businesses get set up and get productive in the Google workspace ecosystem. If you're already a customer of workspace, I'm sure we can help you to get more out of your investment. And if you're not yet a part of the Google ecosystem, well, then it might be time to investigate that either way, make sure you get in touch with our team. Now, Google workspace gives you the ability to switch away from the consumer version of Google, which is your email [email protected] and actually use a professional business name in the Google ecosystem. What that means is that you are able to use all of Google's tools in a professional environment. And you've got an admin panel where you can add and remove users and have full control of all the data and all of the happenings inside your business domain. If you're interested in that, then please be sure to reach out to our team.
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
