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In 2019, Google released Google Voice for Google Workspace. 

Now, Google is offering it to Google Workspace customers. It’s a tool that will prove useful as teams around the world adjust to remote work and supervisors decide how to efficiently manage a remote team as the way we work is rapidly changing.

What is Google Voice?

Google Voice uses VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) which allows you to make voice calls through an internet connection.

Google Voice can be used in lieu of a landline phone or as a way to offer a business phone connection to the mobile devices of their employees.

It’s very easy to set up as it only requires an internet connection and a device to connect with. It’s also easy to use, and comes with an uncomplicated per-user/per-month pricing model. Google Voice integrates with Google Workspace seamlessly. Each team member can select their own Google Voice number or you can assign numbers. If you already have phone numbers set up, those numbers can be used. All incoming communication (voicemail, text, email) will be forwarded to your inbox, so you or your team members can quickly prioritize communications. It’s a fantastic and affordable option that works well for businesses of every size.

Features

Free Calls to the U.S. and Canada: One of the best features for small businesses is unlimited calling throughout the U.S and Canada, for free. This avoids carrier fees, and is much more professional than Skype calling.

Group Messaging: Free SMS messaging including group and photo MMS is also included in Google Voice. 

Affordable International Calling Rates: https://voice.google.com/rates

Voicemail Transcriptions: This feature sends your voicemail to your phone text, and sends it to your email. 

Personalized Greetings: With Google Voice you can actually set up specific greetings for specific callers. 

Call Forwarding: Google Voice gives every member a free phone number that you can use on multiple devices. You can have up to 6 different existing numbers set to forward to your new Google Voice number.  

Record Calls:  By pressing four on your dial pad you can automatically record your calls.

Want to learn more about how Google Voice can benefit your business? Contact one of our Google experts: sales@premiercloud.com

Google Currents, a software for internal enterprise communication, is replacing Google+ for Google Workspace, with a brand new look, feel, and set of features. 

Currents is lauded as a place to engage employees and have meaningful discussions within the organization.

The user interface and experience remains mostly unchanged with a home stream ordered by chronology, while posts from company leadership can be given priority. Text, links, images, and other content from Drive can be shared, along with polls.

Admins can shape discussions in the organization by creating custom streams to promote specific content to a targeted set of employees or the entire company. Additionally, admins can measure engagement across the platform with metrics to track usage and understand what content is resonating across the organization.

Currents makes it easy to cultivate meaningful discussions by encouraging leaders and employees to exchange ideas across the organization and gather valuable feedback and input from others — without flooding inboxes.

Currents is offered in the Basic, Business and Enterprise plans.

Get in touch with our Google Experts to learn more. Call us 888-866-2230 or email us at sales@premiercloud.com

Google Workspace offers a versatile, collaborative and secure suite of cloud-based tools and applications that can be accessed anywhere, on any device, at any time – even in the absence of an internet connection. Virtually every industry has a plethora of success stories and use cases for how they leverage
Google Workspace for their business needs – this article is focused on the Real Estate sector. Here are some of the primary ways that Real Estate firms are leveraging Google Workspace:

• Flexible billing options
• Collaboration tools 
• Secure document sharing
• Advanced spam filtering 
• Data Loss Prevention (DLP)

Flexible billing options

When customers purchase their Google Workspace licenses through Premier Cloud, they have the ability to decide what payment plan that works best for them, whether it’s monthly, quarterly, annually or a custom payment option. For businesses and industries that experience regular fluctuations in their workforce, Google’s monthly (flexible) option is ideal. This pay-as-you-go model allows for customers to scale up & down without any penalties and no long-term contracts – you only pay for what you need, when you need it with Google Workspace, which is rare in today’s marketplace of productivity tools where annual contracts are the standard.

Collaboration tools 
Collaborate on Docs, Sheets and Chat in real time; quickly find space on everybody’s calendar, and run meetings from anywhere. Keep your team connected with premium video conferencing through Google Meet built on Google’s robust and secure global infrastructure. Meet is included with Google Workspace.

Secure document sharing
With Google Workspace, you’ll enjoy instant and secure file storage and sharing through Google Drive. You’ll have access to unlimited Document Storage (Business or Enterprise licenses) and Powerful Document Search powered by Google.      

Advanced Spam Filtering
Google Workspace offers industry-leading AI powered security solutions, reducing the risk of data breach by over 95%. Google’s built-in spam filter is the most sophisticated and effective on the market. Compared to Microsoft’s 97% spam rate, Google is sitting at 99.9%. 

Real estate agents are always working on their phones and meeting clients around town. This on the go activity runs the risk of exposing your company or client data through the loss or mishandling of devices. Real-estate companies are the current lowest-hanging digital fruit for cybercriminals. The FBI claims that real-estate companies are specially targeted in these attacks and every participant in the real-estate transaction is a possible victim. With Google Workspace, it’s easy to set user and device level data protection from the admin control panel, which will instantly make this relatively frequent corporate data security concern a thing of the past for your business. Google Workspace surpasses the most stringent privacy and security standards. Enjoy the peace of mind that comes with enterprise-level data security included in your low monthly fee when you choose Google Workspace.

Our Google experts will assist you in selecting the best Google Workspace plan for your Real Estate business.
Call us at 888-866-2230, or email us sales@premiercloud.com

Google Cloud has launched several new features in the wake of the work transformation surrounding Covid 19. Leaders are realizing the necessity of selecting the best productivity and collaboration tools.

Here are some updates to Google Workspace and Google Meet that will enhance your workplace.

Integrated Workspace

Google Cloud has brought email, chat, voice, and video together. Having all of these channels amalgamated within Gmail will allow your teams to focus on relevant work as opposed to endless searching and bouncing from app to app. Google Cloud is making the collaboration features in Chat rooms even better by adding shared files and tasks. Teams will be able to open and co-edit documents with their colleagues without leaving Gmail, making real-time collaboration even more intuitive and easy. The new integrated space will also allow your teams to work seamlessly with third-party applications like DocuSign, Salesforce, and Trello. 

Find the Right Information Quickly

For most employees, roughly 20-30% of the work week is spent searching for information. To help boost productivity, Google Cloud has expanded Gmail’s search capabilities to include Chat which is an incredible time saver.

Move Easily Between Channels

Teams can swiftly join a video call from a chat, seamlessly forward a chat message to their inbox, easily create a task from a chat message, and more. Teams are able to communicate and collaborate more fluidly and thus more efficiently.

Google Meet Updates

Google Meet is making remote work easier in the following ways:

Customizable and Blurred Backgrounds

Google Cloud will be making it easier to blur out your background, or replace it with an image of your choosing to avoid navigating meetings from with kids playing in the background, or an embarrassing pile of laundry in view.

Larger Meeting Size and Layout

Google Meet’s new selection of layouts ensure teams can better see who, and what is necessary to see in meetings. The addition of the tiled layout in April gave users the ability to see 16 other participants in a meeting as well as content that’s being shared at the same time. More improvements are being developed that will enable participants to see up to 49 other participants at once. 

Other developments coming soon:

Meeting Attendance: This feature will give meeting hosts a way to see who is attending their meeting.
Hand Raising: This feature will enable users to “raise their hands” when they have a question or something to say during large meetings and thus increase participation.
Breakout Rooms: This feature will make it easy for large meetings to split into smaller groups, and reconvene once finished. 

Want to learn more about Google Workspace? Get in touch with our Google experts: sales@premiercloud.com

The world is rapidly moving to an increased focus on the deskless workplace and cloud workers.

There are numerous benefits when you harness the full capabilities of Google Cloud. 

Here are the first four benefits of Google Cloud computing:

Security
There’s a massive risk when corporate data is placed outside of your company. When employees or teams are using hardware or software that hasn’t been approved for use by your IT department, otherwise known as shadow IT, the security of your organization is at risk. Shadow IT may transpire if your IT department is slow to approve a request, or when workers don’t know they need to make a request. The Google Cloud offers stronger protection against unmitigated shadow IT risks and other security vulnerabilities. The cloud offers many tools that can help your IT team track unauthorized applications and extensions, individual user usage and more.

Innovate
When teams are struggling with slow servers, bad network connections, hard drive failures and so on, they are focusing more time on getting the system to function than to use it to innovate. The Google Cloud is designed for innovation through integrated avenues for communication and collaboration in Google Workspace. On Google Workspace, teams have easy and quick access to shared docs, slides, sheets, chats, hangouts and video conferencing tools rather than using a file that only allows one user to edit it at the same time. When teams are more productive, they have the opportunity to be more creative.

Faster business decisions and collaboration
You miss out on key business deals when you can’t quickly access the data you need to make key business decisions. Operations within a Google cloud become much more fluid due to easily accessible data. Your information is stored securely in the cloud and accessible from any device, from anywhere in the world at any given time. With Google’s Offline mode, you don’t even need to be connected to wifi.  As a result, team collaboration is improved. More than one person can access cloud-based documents at the same time and work together in real-time to edit them and comment with each other in chat features.

Cost effective
If you’re employing legacy processes and procedures, you could find yourself in technical debt. Your budget is allocated to maintaining older capital equipment, and your IT department’s time is spent managing these servers. The Forrester report from 2019 revealed that over a three-year period, payback on investment would occur within the first 12 months post-migration. Results of interviews of eight Google Workspace customers indicated top-line revenue growth at an additional $12.9 million after transformation and total end-user and IT productivity gains totaling $23.6 million. The total ROI was 331%. 

Get in touch with our team of Google Experts to learn more about Google Workspace productivity tools and Google Cloud computing. Call us 888-866-2230 or email us at sales@premiercloud.com