Google’s Apps for Work is Now Called G Suite

In a blog post, Google today announced that they’re officially rebranding their Apps for Work productivity suite to a simpler title: G Suite. With this title, it seems that Google’s not only targeting businesses and teams but standalone people who need more from the company’s services.

Not much is changing feature wise due to the G Suite renaming, however as 9to5Google notes, there’s plenty of additions that many users will find useful:

• Quick Access in Google Drive for Android, “which shaves 50 percent off the average time it takes to get to the right file by eliminating the need to search for it.”
• “Find a time” in Google Calendar, which “suggests meeting times and available rooms based on your preferences.”
• Smarter spreadseets: “You can simply enter your question using natural language and Explore in Google Sheets will use Natural Language Processing to translate your question into a formula and offer an instant answer.”
• Explore in Google Docs, which uses machine intelligence to “automatically recommend related topics to learn about, images to insert and more content to discover.”
• Explore in Google Slide, which “dynamically offers layout suggestions that help your content shine.”
• Team Drives, which “helps streamline teamwork from end-to-end, from onboarding a new team member to offboarding a departing team member.”
• Team Meetings, which is a new meeting experience for Google Hangouts that makes things easier: “no downloads, no browser plugins, invite anyone, join from any device, even without an account or a data connection.”

Other than that, the same Gmail, Docs, Drive, Calendar, Hangouts, etc apps are available for use with their usual work-oriented extras like real-time collaboration and ‘@yourcompanynamehere.com’ domains standard users don’t receive with Google’s suite of services. In addition, Google’s also announcing Google Cloud, a service that unifies all of the company’s cloud services such as their various APIs, Android and Chrome OS devices with access to the cloud, and now G Suite into one area of focus.

Today we’re announcing Google Cloud, Google’s unique and broad portfolio of products, technologies and services that let our customers operate in a digital world easily and at peak performance.

Google Cloud spans every layer. It includes all of Google Cloud Platform; our user facing collaboration and productivity applications — now named G Suite; all of our machine learning tools and APIs, the enterprise maps APIs; and the Android phones, tablets and Chromebooks that access the cloud. All of this, built for the cloud from the get-go.

There’s also a bunch of new additions to Google Cloud that you can read more about here as there’s too many to list.

What’s your take on G Suite and Google Cloud? Are they the future of productivity with Google?

• SOURCES: Official Google Cloud Blog (1), (2), (3), 9to5Google