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readersforum · 6 years ago

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The Ultimate Guide to G Suite

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The Ultimate Guide to G Suite

As both an employee and small business owner, I adore G Suite. I’d consider it one of the best tools I have at my disposal, mainly because it’s so easy to use and incredibly multi-functional.

Whether I’m collaborating with my editor on a new HubSpot blog piece, scheduling time to chat with a new client, or emailing my friends a funny dog GIF, G Suite comes in handy for almost anything you’re doing on your computer — productive or otherwise.

Google entered 2019 with 5 million paying G Suite customers — a number that’s increased by 25% since the beginning of 2017. I’ll let that statistic speak for itself: G Suite is a highly valuable tool for individuals and businesses worldwide. Notable G Suite customers include Uber, BuzzFeed, PwC, and, of course, HubSpot.

If you haven’t tapped into the G Suite platform for your business, we encourage you to check it out. Read through this guide to better understand the G Suite platform, how you can optimize your account, and how you can use the tool to grow better. Better yet, bookmark this so you can reference it later.

G Suite was released 12 years ago as “Google Apps for Your Domain”. The initial launch included Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, and Google Page Creator (now known as Sites). Google Apps for Education followed two months later.

Over the last 10 years, Google released various tools and updates as part of its application suite. Google Apps was rebranded to G Suite in September of 2016, and not long after, the company launched its first hardware product: Jamboard.

The G Suite platform also includes the G Suite Marketplace (which was originally released in 2010), through which you can install third-party cloud applications to use as part of your collection of G Suite tools.

Who uses G Suite?

Both businesses and individuals use G Suite.

Consumer accounts aren’t necessarily called “G Suite,” though. For example, when I’m signed into my personal Google account, the top right corner of the screen looks like this:

Alternatively, when I’m signed into my personal business Google account, the top right corner reflects this:

While G Suite services are free for consumers, businesses have to pay for enterprise features such as a custom email domain, unlimited cloud storage, additional administrative and marketing tools, and 24/7 support. (We’ll get into the G Suite pricing structure later.)

If businesses have multiple users on their G Suite, they also have to pay per person. Here’s what Google looks like when I’m signed into my HubSpot employee account:

Unlike other free consumer software, though, free G Suite users don’t see ads while using the services. Bonus: Google doesn’t use the information stored in G Suite applications and accounts for advertisement purposes.

The G Suite Products

Google offers a wide variety of products for both personal and enterprise use. Most are accessible with a Google account (by tapping the menu in the top right corner), though some need to be installed as Google Chrome extensions to gain full functionality.

Later, we’ll walk through how to set up and manage your G Suite account, but for now, let’s review the different tools available in your G Suite.

Gmail

Gmail is the G Suite email software. It was released in 2004 and now has over 1 billion users worldwide.

With a G Suite plan, businesses enjoy 30GB of storage space, custom company email addresses ([email protected]), unlimited Google Group email addresses, 24/7 phone and email support, and compatible add-ons available through the G Suite Marketplace.

Know the second a lead opens an email, send a perfectly timed follow-up, and close deals faster than ever with HubSpot’s Email Tracking — compatible with Gmail.

Drive

Google Drive is the G Suite cloud storage platform and was launched in 2012. Drive manages all of your company’s content and supports collaboration across your entire organization. It also allows you to view various file formats so you don’t have to download additional software to your devices.

Depending on the G Suite plan, businesses enjoy 30GB, 1TB, or unlimited storage per user and audit and reporting insights for Drive content.

Docs, Sheets, and Slides

Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides are the G Suite word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation programs, respectively. They were added to the platform in 2006.

These programs allow real-time collaboration, save changes automatically, and track revision history. Users can insert comments, suggest edits, communicate through a built-in chat, and create templates for future use.

With a G Suite plan, businesses enjoy unlimited revision history among other perks.

Forms

Google Forms is the G Suite web form and survey tool. Also launched in 2006, Forms shares many of the same features as Docs, Sheets, and Slides, such as automatic saving, real-time collaboration, and template creation. To collect data through Forms, users can personalize surveys or quizzes, send respondents the URL, and review the data (that’s automatically collected in Sheets).

Download HubSpot’s Free Online Form Builder to convert your visitors into leads and start growing your business faster.

Calendar

Google Calendar is the G Suite online calendar. It was launched in 2006 and integrates with Gmail to manage schedules, appointments, meetings, and tasks (via Google Tasks).

With a G Suite plan, businesses enjoy smart scheduling (where employees can see open windows of time on coworkers’ calendars), calendars for Google Groups, calendars for meeting rooms and shared resources, public calendars so customers can view company events, and easy migration from external calendars (e.g. iCal, Outlook, or Exchange).

Google+

Google+ is the G Suite social network. It was launched in 2011, and as of October 2018, Google is planning to sunset Google+ for consumers in April 2019.

But, with a G Suite plan, businesses can still enjoy the service as well as restricted communities and enhanced privacy controls.

Sites

Google Sites is the G Suite website builder. It was added to the platform in 2008 and allows users to create websites with little to no coding knowledge or design skills. Landing page and project websites can be created using pre-made templates and published internally or publicly.

Hangouts

Google Hangouts is the G Suite communication and messaging tool. Originally launched in 2006 as Google Talk, Hangouts supports text, voice and video conversations (for up to 25 participants) and can be used between desktop and mobile devices. It’s also a common alternative to Slack.

With a G Suite plan, businesses enjoy a seamless integration with Calendar, screen sharing for participants, auto focus and intelligent muting features, public livestreams automatically saved in YouTube, and custom administrative controls.

Keep

Google Keep is the G Suite note-taking tool. The newest addition to the G Suite platform, Keep can be used to create, organize, and share memos, lists, images and voice notes across multiple devices. It’s available as a Chrome download and mobile application.

With a G Suite plan, businesses enjoy a seamless integration with Google Docs among other perks.

Need more hours in the day? Download our complete workplace productivity guide here.

G Suite for Business

There’s no doubt G Suite is a valuable tool for businesses of all sizes. It’s the digital equivalent of a pocket knife — it supports collaboration, organization, productivity, marketing, and sales.

Do you think G Suite would be a great addition to your company? Follow along this section as we discuss how to set up G Suite for business.

G Suite Pricing

Over the last ten years, G Suite has grown and expanded tremendously … without changing their prices. (How crazy is that?)

Since day one, Google has offered two G Suite business offerings: the G Suite Basic Edition (at $5 per user per month) and the G Suite Business Edition (at $10 per user per month). Read more about the G Suite Editions here.

On January 16, 2019, Google announced that, for the first time in a decade, they’d be raising the prices of G Suite (albeit by a fraction). Starting on April 2, the Basic Edition will increase to $6 per user per month, and the Business Edition will increase to $12 per user per month. Pricing for G Suite Enterprise Edition customers won’t change.

Despite the incremental increase, G Suite is still a fantastic investment for your business. The per-user pricing model presents a cost that’s proportionate to each business, regardless of size. Also, with the G Suite Flexible Plan, businesses can pay monthly and avoid long-term commitment.

Setting Up Your G Suite Account

Creating a G Suite account is simple. Head to the G Suite homepage and click “Get Started.”

Enter your company name and indicate how many employees you have. You can always change this number as your team grows.

Next, enter your contact information (or the information for whoever will be managing the G Suite account). Google will send a confirmation to the email address you insert here, so be sure it’s accessible.

The next screen will ask if you have a business domain name. If you already have one, insert it here. If you don’t, Google will help you find and purchase one — most domains are $12/per year if purchased through Google.

Enter your business address and contact information on the next screen.

Finally, choose a username and password for your G Suite account. You’ll use these credentials to sign into any G Suite tools in the future. Note: Your username will also be the first part (or local-part) of your business email.

To complete your account set up, you’ll be asked to review your account and check out. On this screen, you’ll see a summary of your monthly charges (after your 14-day trial) and any other one-time charges, such as a domain name. You’ll also be asked to review your account information and enter your payment method.

Lastly, you’ll see two choices to automatically renew your domain and keep your domain information private — we encourage you to keep those checked to simplify the domain purchase process.

Managing Your G Suite Account

Once you create your G Suite account, you’ll be directed to your G Suite Admin panel. This is arguably the most important part of your G Suite account — you’ll manage all of your settings from this page.

Let’s break down the sections and what you can do within each.

Users

This is where you add new users to your G Suite account. You can also manage your users and assign them various attributes, like Job Title and Department, as well as track their Last sign in and Email usage.

Company profile

This is where you update information about your company and personalize your G Suite account with your company logo. You can also create custom URLs to your various G Suite services for your users.

Billing

This is where you view your account charges and manage your G Suite license(s). You should see whichever Edition (plan) you chose for your business reflected here.

Reports

This is where you track the usage of your G Suite services and apps as well as user activity. Under Highlights, you’ll see an overview of usage activity per app, user status, storage statistics, and security. Under Reports, you’ll see options to run reports on specific services, devices, and users. You can also run audits to see what users are accessing what services and tools.

Apps

This is where you manage your G Suite services and their settings. Here, you’ll see how many G Suite core apps you’re using, what additional Google services you’re using, and any Marketplace or Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) services you’ve connected to your account.

Device management

This is where you secure your company data on all devices connected to your G Suite account. You’ll see how many mobile and Chrome devices are connected as well as how many Google devices (like Jamboard) are linked to your account. There’s also a handy screen on which you can manage all your company-owned devices.

Security

This is where you manage all security features for your G Suite account. From password management and monitoring to setting up single sign-on (SSO), this page equips you to keep your G Suite account and users secure.

Support

This is where you access G Suite support, which is available 24/7 over phone or email. Before being directed to a live support line, though, you’ll be shown a Help for Admins pop-up box with recommended help content.

Data migration

This is where you import your company email, calendar, and contact data. Google makes it easy to bring over any company data you need to successfully organize and use your G Suite. You’ll need to run this tool for each type of data you migrate. To run a migration, you’ll need the migration source, connection protocol, and the credentials of an account to verify that you own the data.

Dashboard

This is where you see relevant insights about any business domains connected to your G Suite account.

Buildings and resources

This is where you manage and monitors any buildings, rooms, and company resources connected to your G Suite account. Here, you’ll plug in any meeting and conference rooms that you want to be available for your users to schedule on their Calendar. You can also access insights that tell you how and when your rooms are being used.

Groups

This is where you create groups and mailing lists. Groups are handy for communicating with entire teams or parts of your organization at once. You can also give each group its own calendar for scheduling events and managing team meetings.

Admin roles

This is where you add new admins and manage current admin roles and permissions for your G Suite account. You can also set admin permissions for specific groups, services, and devices. You’ll see what admins have what permissions, and you can change those accordingly.

Domains

This is where you can add or remove domains associated with your G Suite account. You can add a new domain or domain alias on this page, as long as you can verify ownership. You can also manage where your visitors are redirected when they visit your domain.

Note: I used my personal business G Suite account to pull example images for this section. You’ll see that there’s only one user on my account (me 🙋🏻‍♀️) … your account and admin panel will likely look much different if you have multiple users, groups, admins, and domains.

Six Ways to Use G Suite to Grow Better

G Suite is a valuable platform for your company. But how can you use it to grow your business better? Below, we cover seven specific strategies for making the most of your G Suite account.

Check out the G Suite + HubSpot integration today and see how it can benefit your business growth.

1. Create On-Brand Templates with Drive

Brand identity is crucial, and the cost of branding and logo design can be costly. Who wants to see their marketing dollars go to waste (i.e. see employees using off-brand documents, presentations, and graphics)? I sure wouldn’t.

Use your G Suite services to simplify the process of staying on-brand. Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Forms all have template capabilities — have a designer create on-brand design templates and save them to your Drive. Then, encourage your employees to use these templates instead of starting from scratch.

2. Collect Customer Feedback with Forms

Customer feedback is the lifeblood of a healthy, growing business. If you don’t know what you’re doing right, you can’t do more of it. If your don’t know what you’re doing wrong, you can’t fix it. Customer feedback should be a high priority for your company.

Google Forms makes it easy to gather and analyze data from customers and clients. Use the tool to create simple surveys that collect customer feedback, market research, your Net Promoter Score®, and more. You can also use Forms to conduct internal research or gather information from peers and coworkers.

3. Empower Remote Employees with Calendar

Take it from me — as awesome as remote work can be, there’s something to be said about working alongside your team every day. For one, it can be easier to collaborate if you see each other in person. But that’s not always possible for those who work remotely or internationally.

If you have remote employees, Google Calendar can help them feel connected and included in what’s going on at work. Calendar makes it easy to see coworkers’ schedules and book time in an open room by their desk — without ever having to step foot in the office. You can also set up dedicated calendars for company-wide events or extracurriculars like the gym or after-work book clubs. Employees can simply subscribe to those calendars to stay up-to-date.

4. Manage Team Tasks with Keep

The internet keeps us connected, but it can still be hard to collaborate remotely. If you’ve ever wanted a place to digitally jot notes, make lists, draw sketches, and save images, all while working in tandem with multiple people, Keep is the solution for you. Keep is a common Evernote alternative that’s super helpful even if you’re not using G Suite.

Use Keep to manage team tasks, outstanding projects, and ongoing collaborations. Create checklists to stay on top of assignments, and link a Collaborator so they can see what’s due. You can also save articles and websites to your Keep folder and add notes with important thoughts and ideas — making online research even easier.

5. See How Employees are Using G Suite with Reports

Not everyone uses G Suite equally. The Reports panel on your Admin Console can tell you how and how often your team is using the G Suite tools and apps. Use this insight to better educate your team on what G Suite has to offer. Also, the Reports panel can provide valuable security information — like what devices have been used to login and which users might need to install updates — so you can keep your team and data safe and secure.

6. Leverage New Tools on the G Suite Marketplace

The G Suite Marketplace is one of my favorite places to shop. Google has integrated literally hundreds of third-party tools that only serve to make your and your employees lives easier. Choose from tools for business, productivity, communication, education, and utility. Download apps like Zoom, Xero, Google Analytics, and Asana to link seamlessly to your G Suite account and integrate with other apps like Sheets, Calendar, and more.

Tip: Keep an eye on how your employees are using any new tools to see if they’re benefiting your business or not.

Check out and install the HubSpot app on G Suite Marketplace today.

Take Your Business to the Next Level with G Suite

For the last decade, G Suite has been helping businesses collaborate, communicate, and grow. Through simple tools and an even simpler on-boarding process, G Suite has become an indispensable tool for companies worldwide. Regardless of what industry you’re in, G Suite can only serve to help you improve your business processes, inside and out.

G Suite equips your employees to complete hundreds of tasks with ease — productive or otherwise. 😉

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lindyhunt · 6 years ago

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The Ultimate Guide to G Suite

As both an employee and small business owner, I adore G Suite. I’d consider it one of the best tools I have at my disposal, mainly because it’s so easy to use and incredibly multi-functional.

Who uses G Suite?

Both businesses and individuals use G Suite.

Consumer accounts aren’t necessarily called “G Suite,” though. For example, when I’m signed into my personal Google account, the top right corner of the screen looks like this:

Alternatively, when I’m signed into my personal business Google account, the top right corner reflects this:

If businesses have multiple users on their G Suite, they also have to pay per person. Here’s what Google looks like when I’m signed into my HubSpot employee account:

The G Suite Products

Later, we’ll walk through how to set up and manage your G Suite account, but for now, let’s review the different tools available in your G Suite.

Gmail

Gmail is the G Suite email software. It was released in 2004 and now has over 1 billion users worldwide.

Know the second a lead opens an email, send a perfectly timed follow-up, and close deals faster than ever with HubSpot’s Email Tracking — compatible with Gmail.

Drive

Depending on the G Suite plan, businesses enjoy 30GB, 1TB, or unlimited storage per user and audit and reporting insights for Drive content.

Docs, Sheets, and Slides

Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides are the G Suite word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation programs, respectively. They were added to the platform in 2006.

With a G Suite plan, businesses enjoy unlimited revision history among other perks.

Forms

Download HubSpot’s Free Online Form Builder to convert your visitors into leads and start growing your business faster.

Calendar

Google Calendar is the G Suite online calendar. It was launched in 2006 and integrates with Gmail to manage schedules, appointments, meetings, and tasks (via Google Tasks).

Google+

Google+ is the G Suite social network. It was launched in 2011, and as of October 2018, Google is planning to sunset Google+ for consumers in April 2019.

But, with a G Suite plan, businesses can still enjoy the service as well as restricted communities and enhanced privacy controls.

Sites

Hangouts

Keep

With a G Suite plan, businesses enjoy a seamless integration with Google Docs among other perks.

Need more hours in the day? Download our complete workplace productivity guide here.

G Suite for Business

Do you think G Suite would be a great addition to your company? Follow along this section as we discuss how to set up G Suite for business.

G Suite Pricing

Over the last ten years, G Suite has grown and expanded tremendously … without changing their prices. (How crazy is that?)

Setting Up Your G Suite Account

Creating a G Suite account is simple. Head to the G Suite homepage and click “Get Started.”

Enter your company name and indicate how many employees you have. You can always change this number as your team grows.

Enter your business address and contact information on the next screen.

Lastly, you’ll see two choices to automatically renew your domain and keep your domain information private — we encourage you to keep those checked to simplify the domain purchase process.

Managing Your G Suite Account

Let’s break down the sections and what you can do within each.

Users

Company profile

This is where you update information about your company and personalize your G Suite account with your company logo. You can also create custom URLs to your various G Suite services for your users.

Billing

This is where you view your account charges and manage your G Suite license(s). You should see whichever Edition (plan) you chose for your business reflected here.

Reports

Apps

Device management

Security

Support

Data migration

Dashboard

This is where you see relevant insights about any business domains connected to your G Suite account.

Buildings and resources

Groups

Admin roles

Domains

Six Ways to Use G Suite to Grow Better

G Suite is a valuable platform for your company. But how can you use it to grow your business better? Below, we cover seven specific strategies for making the most of your G Suite account.

Check out the G Suite + HubSpot integration today and see how it can benefit your business growth.

1. Create On-Brand Templates with Drive

2. Collect Customer Feedback with Forms

3. Empower Remote Employees with Calendar

4. Manage Team Tasks with Keep

5. See How Employees are Using G Suite with Reports

6. Leverage New Tools on the G Suite Marketplace

Tip: Keep an eye on how your employees are using any new tools to see if they’re benefiting your business or not.

Check out and install the HubSpot app on G Suite Marketplace today.

Take Your Business to the Next Level with G Suite

G Suite equips your employees to complete hundreds of tasks with ease — productive or otherwise. 😉

0 notes

mikegchambers · 8 years ago

Text

Slightly Cloudy with a Chance of SaaS

SaaS is often so brainlessly easy to implement that for many executives it should be the first toe-test into cloud

There is a logical progression in the psychological Stages of Cloud Acceptance among business and IT executives:

Do nothing. Hope it goes away.

Get concerned that you’re last to the party.

Realize that the security issues are perfectly manageable.

Trial some low-risk SaaS applications.

Test cloud with a tiny, non-critical new project so nobody gets fired if it doesn’t work out.

Migrate all the back-ups and disaster recovery to the cloud.

Road bump! Find it’s costing more than expected… and then rearchitect quietly to do it properly this time.

Seriously embrace hybrid cloud since it seems to offer everything.

Ditch hybrid because it’s not delivering as expected — go full public cloud.

Wonder what to do with all the data centers you no longer need.

These are the 10 steps to True Cloud Enlightenment. It can take between 2 to 5 years from “no cloud ever” to boasting at executive lunches how you predicted the whole cloud thing and saved millions on data centers.

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The Enterprise Adoption Curve

— @swardley

In my prior blogs we’ve discussed that the cloud isn’t going away (all growth charts are up and to the right), you’re not too late to the party, and there are all sorts of robust security solutions that can solve your PCI, HIPAA and other regulatory and compliance needs.

The next step in our cloud evolution is SaaS — pronounced ‘sass’ by the cool kids — which is like the Häagen-Daz of software naming.

SaaS is the Gateway Drug to Cloud

If you like your acronyms to have upper and lowercase letters, you’ve come to the right place since we have SaaS, PaaS and IaaS all as descriptors for different levels of cloud.

Software-as-a-Service (Saas) might sound mysterious, but think of it ‘more like Gmail, less like installing from CD’. SaaS is usually software that runs in a browser and takes care of itself — major apps like Salesforce, Concur, Workday, Jira and Slack — and for regular users the perception is that it works much better than in-house applications.

All of these SaaS tools have the full usefulness of a piece of software you might have once installed from a DVD, tar file or diskette — remember that? But now the software platform itself automagically manages upgrades, backups, security and other boring activities that you would perhaps screw up if you did them in-house.

An important takeaway here is that although these apps appear to be stand-alone — after all, they are outside your company — they can integrate with other software very easily. All popular SaaS apps talk to other on-premise and cloud-based applications using APIs, which are basically like commands for passing information back and forth without needing to know how the systems work internally.

Most work with LDAP so you can use your existing corporate directory of users. And there are also some great tools like Zapier which help wire up how these applications chat to each other, so you can automate a calendar invite from Google Mail when a new lead appears in a Salesforce from a Marketo landing page (not the most useful examine I know).

The net effect is that SaaS apps behave like in-house apps but they are much faster to deploy — and work all the time.

Arguably the biggest drawback of a SaaS app is that it’s a black box managed by another company. But unless your corporate mission is to run commoditized applications better than Google or Microsoft, you should quickly shun such negative thoughts. SaaS will go a long way to simplifying your technology costs, managing headcount and reducing misery and suffering caused by your badly implemented versions of the same thing. It’s also a very safe first step if you are in IT Management (hint, hint).

SaaS is often so brainlessly easy to implement that for many executives it should be the first toe-test into cloud.

How Much Does All of This Cost?

On the one hand, SaaS apps are nothing like the usual IT boondoggle which can be bad for executives depending on vendor dinners and charity golf events to fill their social calendars. Importantly, much like other cloud services, your spend will move almost entirely from capital expenditure to operating expenditure, so no more depreciation games for the accounting department either.

While the total cost of ownership will drop overall, there are some subtleties:

Licensing fees generally move from single purchase, per-seat or “let’s pick a number” to standard per-user subscription monthly pricing.

You may require outside advisory services for configuration and migration, and often companies forget to budget for this.

Change management costs are usually overstated since SaaS usability is often much better than what its replacing.

Sometimes migration costs are hard to predict but will depend on how much of a undocumented, labyrinthine, Kafka-esque cluster your existing system is.

A Quick Round-up of the Best SaaS

This is becoming a crowd marketplace and there are hundreds of quality apps in this space. Still I wanted to mention a few of the best SaaS offerings currently out there, especially the ones with broad applicability.

Google Suite — the Gold Standard of SaaS

Google’s Microsoft Office alternative was one of the first SaaS offerings and is probably the most widely known. A few years ago, I rolled out Google Docs (then renamed Google Apps, then Google Suite) to a few companies and the power of SaaS was quickly obvious. Let’s be honest — corporate email services usually suck, especially if you’re a road warrior with mobile devices, stumbling over large files, systems upgrades and spam floods. For on-premise Outlook users, even moving PCs at work can make you want to never touch a keyboard again.

Google Mail is a fantastic corporate alternative since it takes the suck out of what is essentially a very well established and unexciting piece of technology. Why run your own exchange servers when Google will do this for you for $5 a month? Even Outlook die-hards can tie on their favorite outdated mail client around the service and everyone is happy.

To me, Google Suite embodies all that it great about SaaS. It’s not a clone of Office but does feature the most compelling real-time collaboration tools. A team of people can all edit the same spreadsheet and see each other’s update in real time (no emailing documents back and forth) and it works from any device anywhere equally well. The administration tools are also first-class and going back to on-premise Exchange feels like using a VCR after you’ve seen how Netflix works.

There are big cost savings here if you employ the entire G Suite toolset properly. It can handle your SSO using two-factor and security keys, manage spam better than any other platform, host all your files, and integrate with a Marketplace full of powerful CRM, payroll, accounting and workflow tools. When I hear IT people dismiss it as “just email”, they clearly haven’t seen it in the last decade.

The startling difference between the speed, reliability and cost of on-premise email versus Google is, well, no contest really.

Manage Your Pipeline with Salesforce

Salesforce became the first billion dollar cloud company for a reason — it enabled Sales and Marketing teams to select and configure their own software without dealing with their godawful IT departments. Since it operates in a browser, shadow IT evolved from Excel and Access into the major leagues and by the time IT complained, it was already running a substantial part of the company.

Quickly forgotten after a weekend away.

It’s a decent platform and a good fit for many medium-to-large size companies. Its own sales force can be Oracle-like in trying to use Jedi mind tricks to make you buy everything — you don’t need all the add-ons. It does pay to find a couple of good developers to help with the integration and customization, since this step can easily double the cost of implementation. That aside, CRM has always been a painful software category and Salesforce is a good solution in a difficult space.

There is a common love-hate relationship with Salesforce. Users hate it until you try to take it away.

You Should Really Be Using Workday

I once had the misfortune to work on a large PeopleSoft project and honestly didn’t know software could be architected that poorly. PeopleSoft is/was on-premise and let’s companies customize its performance by writing their own code in the wrong places.

The eventual result is that every upgrade requires consultancy organizations to ‘help you’ analyze your customizations, apply the upgrade, and then reapply the offending code. PeopleSoft implementations break so many established tenets of good coding and architecture standards, I don’t even know where to start.

Workday is great for escaping the PeopleSoft cycle of despair, since it allows rampant customization yet they manage the upgrades invisibly. This is achieved by allowing extensibility (the tech equivalent of adding neon lighting under your car) using well-worn approaches such as plug-ins. Any change you make for your own business doesn’t impact the core code base or any of their other customers in the environment. This is a classic win-win case for SaaS but couldn’t be more stark when compared to the spaghetti coding in the on-premise alternative.

Jira, Confluence and Atlassian

Atlassian makes some solid cloud products and they’re based in Austin so I’ll throw a little Texas love their way. Jira is a wonderfully elegant cloud tool for managing workflow pipelines for agile teams, especially software engineers. This is great if your project tracking tends to happen in spreadsheets and scraps of paper, or you’re trying to make Trello and Basecamp jump through hoops and do unnatural things. For sure, Jira can be a horror show on-premise for complicated reasons but it hums along in the cloud with no issues at all.

Confluence is a Wiki tool by the same company that can tame and replace the on-premise SharePoint dragon that plagues large firms. SharePoint has a tendency to become a maze of outdated documents and pages incredibly quickly, and somehow manages to be both hard to use for the casual user while not really seeming to do very much. The staleness issue is more to do with the fact that philosophically Wikis make much more sense for many businesses experiencing rapid change. It’s easier to keep smaller portals up to date with current information for now than keeping a document archive that somehow is supposed to be the history of a company.

Consider dumping your existing process document repository and replace it with a wiki.

Slack — the Ultimate Communications Tool

There are some strong opinions about Slack especially from people who’ve never used it. On the surface, it’s Skype, Hangouts and every other chat tool rehashed — but why! — until you start testing in different groups of people and realize how closely it mirrors how we all work together today. Out of all the software I’ve used in the last few years, Slack is the biggest surprise in terms of how a brilliantly executed and blissfully simple design accelerates productivity and team communication.

Development teams love Slack almost universally due to its automation capabilities and the sort of off-the-cuff informal chatting options (like using giphy) that dev teams enjoy. But regular humans also quickly embrace the tool’s elegance and I’ve seen it reduce email clutter dramatically as a ‘mass cc’ alternative. It’s also surprising how Slack scales to group of thousands of users and somehow doesn’t drive you insane with updates — many messaging apps look pretty backwards by comparison.

These are just some of the most well known SaaS applications but there are thousands out there. Ever heard of Git? Cloud9? Zendesk? Twilio? Docusign? I guarantee at least one of these will rock your company.

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In upcoming blogs, I’ll dive into AWS and see how to use various services for a simple cloud-based project.

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