Google Workspace for Education

We use Google Workspace for Education as our default for cloud storage, email back end, and browsing (via Chrome). The school has moved to using the Google Suite for docs, presentations, and spreadsheets. The problem that this solves is that it unifies the way the school manages content. Allowing staff to collaborate on documents saves time in knowledge transfer.

Google Workspace is great for organisations that have a need to unify their digital foot print. Google offers so many tools that the ecosystem supports any type of business. Apps like Docs are simple, but paid with collaboration can change an organisation. Where it is less appropriate, is if you have staff that are not self sufficient. Things like setting up an out of office response. In other systems, ICT can do this for you. Under Google they empower the user to do this. If they forget, there is no way for an ICT Admin to do this.

As a public school district, we use Workspace across the entire organization. Every student and staff member has a Google Workspace for Education [(formerly G Suite for Education)] account allowing for smooth and seamless sharing of documents. With email, calendaring, and document creation behind one system, we are more efficient. While we currently use the free version of Workspace, we are considering upgrading due to the increased features being offered.

The Administrative features for the education market are terrific. Google makes it easy to manage your fleet of computers and users. One platform to manage for the bulk of things that are needed in our district. And, since so many other providers support Google Single Sign On (SSO), it makes it easy to integrate with other educational service providers.

Also, with so many school districts across the country and world using Workspace, it makes it very easy to connect and collaborate with others.

Google [Workspace for Education (formerly G Suite for Education)] is pretty darn good [at] meeting the needs for educators and students. It is not designed to run your business office, transportation group, or lunch services. It doesn't need to be good at those. Focus on teachers and students. They do that really, really well.

The Google folks continue to add features that help serve teacher and students. For example, they have really done a good job of adding Google Meet features such as polling and breakout rooms. Those features required a paid subscription to Workspace, but it makes sense since those features compete with Zoom, which requires a subscription for those services.

Google Workspace for Education is used to manage email accounts, groups, meetings, service accounts, and devices, including Chromebooks and mobile devices. This platform enables us to enforce organizational policies, conduct e-discovery, control allowed extensions and applications, and support theft recovery.

In K-12 education, it's very well suited. Having a fleet of over 8,000 Chromebooks, it's very easy to push app/extensions out, review inventory and remotely deprovision devices. The platform is scalable and well suited for any organization requiring email. It's straightforward to set up, it might not be well suited for those using O365 as files can't be easily shared between platforms.

We use it for everything at our school district: Communication (Gmail, Chat and Meet), collaboration (Docs, Sheets and Slides) and coursework management (Classroom). We use the highest tier, Google Workspace for Education Plus, for our students and faculty and staff. This gives us many powerful features, like originality reports in Classroom, Labels in Drive and many security features.

Any K-12 school will benefit from having Google Workspace for Education as their productivity suite. It's an especially good choice if Chrome or Android device management is needed. A school will be able to use GWfE even if they use Microsoft products, as many of the Google tools and editors have interoperability with Microsoft's equivalent services.

We use Google Workspace for Education to host our email and file storage. There is major upside to not having to manage a mail server. The scope of our use case is over one thousnad users. The business problems it solves are numerous. Mostly not maintaing an Exchange server. Users are familliar with the interface. This limits the amount of training we have to perform.

Educators use Google Workspace for Education as it facilitates enhanced collaboration, accessibility, security, and classroom management. Plus, schools like it for its cost-effectiveness.
Migrating all of our file stoare to Google Drive has been a major security improvement for us.
The AI integratin is helpful to us at times. We are looking forward to improvements in this area.

It provides a bedrock of tools and apps that our business can use for communication, content creation, and collaboration. It is compatible with our other companies we do business with. It has great support, documentation, and is on the cutting edge of new features and technology. The new AI tools are phenomenal and only getting better.

It does a great job of being a communication and productivity tool. Google Meets has gotten so much better, and its integration with Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides work seamlessly. Since things are cloud based there's no issue with what type of hardware is being used. This is huge in a mixed OS environment.