What’s different in Google Workspace to a free Gmail account?
This post will show you some of the differences between a paid Google Workspace account and a free personal Gmail account and quite often Google Workspace users aren’t aware of some of the extra features Workspace offers, so let’s have a look some of them here.
Gmail
The first fundamental difference is that your email address won’t have Gmail.com at the end it will have your company domain, e.g. bazroberts.com.
Google Drive
Shared Drives
With a Gmail account you get access to Google Drive and your files and folders live in your My Drive, whereas, Google Workspace has an extra type of drive called Shared Drives.
These are basically special folders where you share them with people but the files and folders within it are owned by the company and not individual accounts. This can be particularly useful when it comes to people leaving an organisation.
They are often used for teams and projects and the people it’s shared with can have different access rights slightly different from normal folders.
Priority and Workspaces
Next, you have a the Priority section, which highlights files which the AI thinks you should have access to, based on things like when you usually open it.
Under that you have Workspaces, which are spaces which allow you to add shortcuts to the files you want at your fingertips and can be grouped together by category.
Storage
One of best things is the additional Drive/Gmail storage you get. With a free Gmail account you get 15Gb, which is pretty good for free, and it was the main reason I initially started using Google Drive, but with a Google Workspace account you can get anything from 30Gb (Business Starter), 2TB (Business Standard) to unlimited space.
Templates
The Google apps like Docs and Sheets, come with some pre-made templates, but what a lot of people don’t know is that with a Google Workspace account, you can create your own ones to share in your organisation.
For example, you can go to sites.google.com which will list your Google Sites you’ve made and then if you click on Template gallery, you will find both the general pre-made ones and the ones for your organisation.
From here a user can make a copy of a site template, saving them having to create one from scratch.
You can also do the same for Docs, Sheets, and Slides. For example, if you go to docs.google.com and template gallery, you can create Google Doc templates for you organisation.
Cloud search
Cloud search allows you to search right across many of the apps – Email, Drive, Sites, Groups, Calendar, and Keep.
By default, it’ll show you what you’ve recently been working on.
As you can see, it returns search results from a wide range of apps.
Google Forms
When you create a Google Form in Workspace, by default it can only be viewed by someone in your organisation. To allow external people access it you have to go into Settings and turn off the restrict to users option.
Google Calendar
The Calendar app has extra options too: Focus time, Out of office, and Appointment slots.
Focus time
If you create a new event, you also have the option to create a Focus time period, which will create a slot of time, where people know you’re focussing on some work, so as not to bother you.
Out of office
Out of office not only tells people you’re not in the office, but you can decline meetings automatically and leave an automatic message.
Appointment slots
Appointment slots allow you to create slots on your calendar where people can sign up for.
Google Meet
Google Meet has a number of different extra features depending on the Google Workspace edition you have.
My meetings
For example, the Education ones have options aimed at online class control.
One nice option you’ll find in Gmail, is that you have a list of your upcoming meetings in the Meet section on the left-hand side bar, called My meetings.
This also allows you to join them directly from Gmail.
Live translations
Some of the more expensive editions now have live translation subtitles. It’s a great feature but a real shame it’s not available for other cheaper editions.
Attendance is also available to some editions, but strangely it’s available to the Business Essentials edition but not the Standard one. It’s one reason why we still have to use Zoom!
Google Chat
There are bots available in Google Chat.
These add functionality to Chat or allow you to do things right from within Chat or Gmail.
Admin console
All this and more can be controlled by a Google Workspace administrator. There is an Admin console specifically for this, where for example, accounts can be created or deleted, or the access to certain apps can be controlled.
Apps script
Apps Script is the code that can automate the Google Apps and there are some benefits to having a Workspace account, for example, scripts can be authorised in a much simpler way, and some of the quotas are higher, like being able to automatically send up to 1,500 emails a day instead of 100.
As you can see there are lots of great features in Google Workspace – Try them out! 😀
Want to learn more about Google Workspace and Apps Script? The books below are available on Amazon. Just click on a book! (Affiliate links).
a
These are really interesting and helpful topics. It called my attention the section about shared drive.
I am curious to know if after someone who creates a script within a file that exists in a shared drive location will continue existing and working if the person who wrote the code leaves the organization and his email is removed from the organization workspace account.
Interesting question: As the file ownership will be the company’s the script file will also remain the company’s and will continue to work even if someone leaves.