Google Workspace Essentials

Google Workspace Essentials is a new no-cost tier of Google Workspace, including access to Google's cloud based productivity apps but without the inclusion of Gmail. According to Google's blog post explaining the release, this is "designed to help people bring the apps they know and love to use in their personal lives to their work life."

When signing up for the service, two things are made clear: 1. This can be purposed for ad-hoc collaboration, as it invites you to list a company name, project name, or similar upon sign-up, so Google is seeking "grass roots" collaborators, not really entire businesses. 2. There is a clear focus on reinforcing that you can use this service to work with Microsoft Office files.

You could describe this as a "shadow IT" play by Google that is directly seeking to have individuals or teams in organizations where IT has chosen services other than Google's to move some or all of their work elsewhere. Those with sophisticated compliance or data loss prevention needs will not be too pleased of this possibility, but it's certainly not an issue unique to Google's platform. Google only provides limited admin tools to deal with this issue in this free account, so it is not directly helping to remediate this problem.

So outside of those concerns, who is this for?

• You already have email from a 3rd party but do not have a full featured cloud based productivity solution in place (perhaps you use Office perpetual licensing without adoption of Microsoft 365).

• You use Microsoft 365 (or another alternative) but prefer some of Google's apps for certain use cases or to collaborate with particular 3rd parties. I have run into this, where despite my organization being a Microsoft 365 user already, a key project partner was so deeply vested in Google Workspaces, that we needed our own account in order to fully collaborate with them.

The main limitations seem to be that you only get 15GB of storage with your account, and any individual plan can only have 25 users associated with it (though you can have more than one plan per company).

Needless to say, it is probably a good plan to run the idea of adding this service past your IT staff before trying to pick up the contents of your entire OneDrive and push it into Google Drive instead. Equally, if you get a request coming into your inbox from of your colleagues purporting to want to collaborate with you in this new service, all the normal due diligence to avoid data compromise is still required.

Be safe when trying out new digital services!

Title image credit: Google cloud blog announcement