G Suite

Puntos a favor

We have been able to completely remove use of Microsoft Office products from our company by adopting G Suite and have dramatically increased our productivity. Online collaboration makes document writing easy and higher quality, while we can also now access all our documents seamlessly across devices and locations. Gmail remains the premiere web-based email system and there is so much added value having youtube and the huge suite of Google services at your finger tips.

Puntos en contra

There is very little bad I can say about G Suite - maybe Google Drawings could be invested in some more. In the past the Office integration was limited but this has been increased significantly over recent years.

Puntos a favor

The best thing about the G-suite is stability. You know that it will work, you know that it will have no bugs and that you will not lose files on the drive or gmail. And it's fast.

Puntos en contra

Some features take time to appear, perhaps it is the price to pay for stability, but in general there are improvements that you don't use, and basic improvements that never arrive. For example, on the drive you still can't use folders as easily as you do in your computer's file explorer, useful panels are missing information. Another problem that I consider serious is the lack of a part of the drive that is "online only" controlled by the administrator. As it is today, it features a temporary drive for common files, because if I put backup files, client spreadsheets and sensitive data, I always know that they are also accessible from my computer or cell phone, but I would not like these files to be "loose" around. If you lose your phone, good luck trying to delete files remotely.

Puntos a favor

G Suite is extremely comprehensive, providing everything from e-mail (Gmail) to cloud storage (Google Drive) to office applications (Docs, Sheets and Slides). An organization can effectively use G Suite for nearly all of one's offices needs. G Suite has fantastic collaboration tools - especially when multiple people are working on the same document. In addition, G Suite's admin console allows for some impressive tweaks and customizations.

Puntos en contra

G Suite's interface is beyond clunky, especially when it comes to the Google Apps side of things. Using a web browser to work on a spreadsheet (Google Sheets) can be a lesson in frustration, as a good chunk of the interface is taken up by not only the web browsers interface, but various unnecessary items within the Google Apps interface. In addition, delving into any of G Suite's backend settings will take you down a rabbit hole of complexity and confusion.

Puntos a favor

We use G Suite for Education, as most schools do. We like most about it is how well it integrates with pretty much every third party that has anything to do in the K12 area. From our curriculum (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) to our SIS (Skyward Qmlativ), we can utilize Google SSO to easily authenticate users to almost every platform we have. This makes it easy and is entirely cloud based and requires no maintenance (unlike Sibboleth) on our end. It also is easy for students because they have only one login to remember.

Puntos en contra

Google is known for "wiping out" stuff randomly (like Google Cloud Print, and LSAs (Less Secure Apps)) so I do not recommend it in a commercial environment because environments with lots of legacy devices will be a bad fit with Google's constant changes.

Puntos a favor

Gsuite offers all the tools you need for collaborative document creation from forms, surveys, spreadsheets, slides (powerpoint), cloud storage, calendars, note taking, accounting and reports.

The templates available for education have many solutions available from lesson planners, calendars, quiz creation, gradebook, reports and meeting programs. Templates can be shared within the community and you can find templates that other schools use and share if it is not available in the standard set. The organizational email system is way more user friendly than other systems. I have worked with a team to establish Gsuite in two schools as the main system, and we are a Google school and the staff and admin do not need Microsoft office anymore as this system covers alternatives to those program.

It auto-saves your work and when working on collaborative documents it is easy to see who has input different items and easily go back and restore previous versions if needed.

Easily compatible to connect data to Google sites.

Puntos en contra

I wish that all the options that are available for excel exist in the Google Spreadsheets - e.g. being able to select multiple tabs and edit all of them at the same time.

As a private international school it is fairly costly with a charge per staff user. Support education in the private sector too - it needs a substantial budget for large schools.