Google Workspace? OR Microsoft 365?

I hear this question all the time: How does Google Workspace compare to Microsoft 365? Which one is better for my business?"

Well…. I suspect that you know the answer I give: "It depends."

Whether Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 is better suited for your business depends on your business needs and your day-to-day operations. Are there any requirements from outside agencies, partners, or clients to use one over the other?

💎 Watch this video to learn more about your options.

Need help with Google Workspace?

KloudGem is contracted by companies that have transitioned into the Google Workspace IT environment and whose users need help re-imagining their prior workflows and need training to be productive with the new software tools. If you have any questions about Google Workspace, schedule a chat:

https://www.kloudgem.com/contact-us 

KloudGem tips: 

https://www.kloudgem.com/follow-resources/newsletter 

Create your own Custom-Built Avatar in Google Vids

Google Vids has been adding so many new features lately, it's hard to keep up. 

In the Avatar section of Google Vids, now you will see a place where you can create an avatar that is entirely custom built.

This feature actually came in handy when I was creating this video, because I happened to have a nasty cold, so I was more than happy to hand over the microphone to an AI colleague in my video.

💎 Watch the video here

❓ What are your thoughts about using AI avatars in your videos?

Need help with Google Workspace? Schedule a Discovery Session:

https://www.kloudgem.com/contact-us 

KloudGem tips: 

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More AI avatars in Google Vids — this time, cartoon characters

A little while ago, I introduced you to some friendly, realistic AI avatars in Google Vids. Now, Google has added cartoon versions as well!

💎 In this video, I introduce you to these playful Google Vids characters.

❓ Which ones do you prefer for you videos, realistic characters or cartoons?

Need help with Google Workspace? Schedule a Discovery Session:

https://www.kloudgem.com/contact-us 

KloudGem tips: 

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Have you set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to protect your email domain?

Are you using a professional domain for your business email?

Have you protected your domain so that scammers can't exploit it by pretending to be you?

💎 In this video, we talk about about SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, the 3 main authentications and policies to protect your email domain from scammers trying to pretend to be you.

❓ Have set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC?

Need help with Google Workspace? Schedule a Discovery Session:

https://www.kloudgem.com/contact-us 

KloudGem tips: 

https://www.kloudgem.com/follow-resources/newsletter 

Project management tool in Google Workspace

Tired of paying for a project management tool you barely use? Learn how Google Sheets can be your cost-effective alternative.

Is your current Project Management tool actually just a place where tasks go to die, because people have a hard time using it—and it's costly to maintain?

💎 Watch the video to see how you can use Google Sheets for project management without having to subscribe to and pay for yet another tool.

Google Sheets isn't just for numbers. It can be formatted to give you a clear Task View, a dynamic Timeline View, and even send Push Notifications to specific team members based on your criteria..

❓ Have you tried this? What do you think?

Need help with Google Workspace? Schedule a Discovery Session:

https://www.kloudgem.com/contact-us 

KloudGem tips: 

https://www.kloudgem.com/follow-resources/newsletter 

On remote work

"I can honestly say that I have done some of my best work when working remotely. And remote work for me, never meant isolated and detached from colleagues, or working in a vacuum, or not working, because early on we 

💎 1) Adopted clear and easy communication channels, and communicated our availability and whereabouts (we harnessed our tools' full capacity), 

💎 2) Set clear goals, 

💎 3) Scheduled regular sync meetings with each other and management, 

💎 4) As needed, we scheduled collaborative/coworking meetings and knew each other's strengths to rely on, and 

💎 5) We made sure that we carved out time for social chats and fun.

Not to mention that when a team is geographically distributed, remote work is more effective in enabling meetings with different parts of the world 🌎 in the morning 🌅 and evening 🌆, because no commute is involved. And yes, you can still build community remotely when some of the team members bring their dinners 🍝 and others brig their breakfasts 🥐 to the virtual meeting." — Gabriella Laszlo, Founder, KloudGem

Mind the gap!

In the life of companies, software is meant to empower people and speed up processes, not hinder. Yet, a common pitfall is the misalignment between software capabilities and actual user needs. This gap can lead to frustration, decreased productivity, and ultimately, impact the bottom line.

Conducting regular gap analyses is crucial to bridging this divide. By actively listening to user feedback and understanding their workflows, organizations can ensure that the software they invest in truly meets the needs of their teams.

Remember, no software is perfect. No software fits 100% of the needs of the users. We will always need to find the closest-to-optimal software and strive to close the gaps and unlock the full potential of our software investments!

Gaps can be closed by:

👉 Consults with users

👉 Trainings for the users: tool, workflow, team, or onboarding training

👉 Developing new features that round out the experience of the core software

👉 Adding auxiliary software

👉 And in some cases, actually replacing the software

Google Workspace -- channeling the company culture into digital form

Working in the cloud has become the norm, and Google Workspace has certainly been leading and defining what that looks like, BUT…. 

⚠️ deploying Google Workspace is not the be-all and end-all. Time and time again we have seen companies adopt the tools, but their users use them inefficiently. Making the tools available is just the start. Facilitating their use is empowering your users to achieve the company goals and 

💎💎💎 weaving the Google Workspace tools into the fabric of your organization. This is where #kloudgem comes in: we can help ensure that your users use the tools strategically and naturally.

Google Workspace tools support:

🏠 Remote Work

🏢🏠 Hybrid Work

🌎 Geographically Distributed Teams

💻↔️💻 Synchronous Work and Asynchronous Work

And the common characteristics among companies who have adopted Google Workspace are: 

📈 They want to achieve higher productivity, 

⌛ They want to speed up their go-to-market time, 

📊 They want to cut out busy work and increase operational efficiency to save on people hours, and 

🫢 They want to reduce human error. 

How the various tools can support your operational efficiency.

—

✉️ Gmail → asynchronous communication

🗨️ Chat → synchronous (and sometimes asynchronous) communication

📅 Calendar → meetings, scheduling, training, awareness, planning, whereabouts/availability, boundaries, work-life balance

🎥 Meet → being on the same page, collaborative work, sync-ups, planning, and fun

🗃️ Drive (Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, Sites, Vids) → storage, version control and accuracy,  document management, contracts, but also sharing,  communication and collaboration, gathering and connecting data, visualization, planning, design, and fun

🔁 AppSheet → data flow, apps

🪄 Gemini, Vids, NotebookLM → content creation and research

Metrics to assess the success of a software rollout

When an organization starts using Google Workspace (or any new platform, really), it's important for the IT department to establish metrics that can help assess the success of the new tools.

These metrics can include the more easily accessible: 

📊 How many active users there are for the tools, compared to the overall users who are supposed to be using the tools.

But they can also include metrics that are a bit more nuanced, like: 

📊 IT expenditures prior to and after the adoption of Google Workspace:

💎 Hardware costs (servers, laptops/desktops, etc.)

💎 Storage costs --  surprisingly, this metric is only somewhat controllable by IT, and very much dependent on user behavior

💎 Support tickets

💎 User satisfaction

💎 Change in ratio of use of approved vs. not approved applications (and cost ramifications) -- this metric is also dependent on whether the users are  fully aware of the tools' capabilities

💎 In some organizations, the time to accomplish tasks and projects can be measured 

❓ Are there other metrics you use?

Don't forget that costs can be reduced by increasing the dexterity with which employees and their teams use the tools. Customized workflow consultations can help significantly. KloudGem LLC is here to help.

Partner with the users so that they use approved tools

⛔ Most companies' IT security policies seem to come in the form of restrictions AGAINST employee/user actions, but with this approach, IT teams are missing a huge opportunity: crowdsourcing employee goodwill to protect information.

😇 Most people want to do the right thing: they want to help protect company information, but they need to do their jobs and hit company goals. 

🌊 It's like water: if there is no path, employees will find or carve a path to accomplish what they need to do. And with only restrictions being offered by IT, those newly carved paths may not be ideal from an IT security perspective: using unapproved software to get the job done, and ultimately causing IT to lose sight of or control over precisely the data they were trying to protect.

↪️But IT teams can also change that:

🤝 Communicate policies clearly, without the jargon, from the start, and repeat them often, making clear the WHYs or the issues that common alternatives create — and extend an invitation for consultations for new business needs; become a trusted solutions partner. And make employees feel that they are part of the team!

💎 This is what KloudGem does: we partner with your IT team to consult with your users, come up with processes within the approved #googleworkspace tools and features, identify gaps and build a trusted bridge between IT and users.

Need-based training goes a longer way than generic training

"Time and time again, I have run into companies where despite general Google Workspace training sessions made available to employees, users kept having difficulties with using the tools efficiently in their own work as well as in collaborative work, causing them to grumble about how bad the tools were compared to the old tools they used to use. In some situations, the grumbling got so loud that the company considered moving away from Google, back to their old tools!

🤔 It got me thinking: if the people went to the training, what made them so disillusioned with the tools?

I thought back to my own past of having been at the receiving end of software training, a good long while ago: Adobe Dreamweaver (a web development tool to create websites). I was surprised at how little I remembered about what I had learned in that training. 

Why?

🛟 The answer lies not in whether or not I got trained, but a lot deeper in human learning: whether or not, and how soon, I applied what was taught. Learning, or the retention of the material taught, is NEED-BASED: if you have the need to learn something and can immediately apply it in your work or life, you retain the knowledge much better than if you are taught something just because at some point you might use it.

Remember the saying "use it or lose it?" It's the same concept. You learn something, but if you don't put it to use immediately, you will not remember it. 

📅 At that time in my life when I got trained in Dreamweaver, I did absolutely no web development. The most I had to do was occasionally find my way around html code enough to correct translation issues or parts of missing html tags. And I could do that in a plain text editor; I didn't need Dreamweaver for it. Was the training interesting? Sure! Dreamweaver was "cool" at that time, and I remember feeling that I had learned a lot. But not using it meant that I retained, at best, just some jargon.

💎 That is why when I started KloudGem, I decided that our training is going to be much more than "just training." 

💎 We CONSULT with the users or teams to first understand their workflow needs so that we can then laser-focus on fulfilling those needs, and teach how to do exactly what they are trying to accomplish day-to-day.

💎 And when we do GROUP TRAINING, we train only on features that are available and used at the given company, so that the material fills a need and can be immediately applied." — Gabriella Laszlo, Founder, KloudGem

Send conditional notifications to your team members from Google Sheets tables

While each person can set notifications for themselves in Google Sheets, the more powerful notifications are the newer Conditional notifications in Google Sheets tables, because they allow you to set up email notifications to be sent to your team members when a cell has specific data in it, for example if their name is entered.

💎 Watch the video to see how to set this up.

❓ Have you tried this? What do you think?

Need help with Google Workspace? Schedule a Discovery Session:

https://www.kloudgem.com/contact-us 

KloudGem tips: 

https://www.kloudgem.com/follow-resources/newsletter 

Put AI Avatars to work in Google Vids

Do you spend countless hours re-recording videos, or are you camera shy? Maybe you just don't feel like getting camera-ready today? Let Google's friendly AI avatars help you out!

While showing your face in business videos can foster a stronger connection with your audience, clients, and prospects—especially for small business owners who are often the face of their brand—I understand that it's not for everyone.

Today, I want to talk about how to put AI avatars to work for you in Google Vids.

💎 Watch the video to see how to get your AI avatars to speak the words you wrote.

❓ What do you think?

Need help with Google Workspace? Schedule a Discovery Session:

https://www.kloudgem.com/contact-us 

KloudGem tips: 

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Don't waste time checking files, get notified!

You are working with a team and you are waiting for your team members to update the status of their tasks or 

you keep looking in the project files to see if they have been filled out. 

Now, especially if you are a project manager, you likely do this daily, or even multiple times a day.

Did you know that you can save all that time by getting notified by email when updates are made to your files?

💎 Watch the video to see how to set this up.

❓ Have you tried this? What do you think?

Need help with Google Workspace? Schedule a Discovery Session:

https://www.kloudgem.com/contact-us 

KloudGem tips: 

https://www.kloudgem.com/follow-resources/newsletter 

Infinite version history in Google files

Has it ever happened to you that a file got changed (either by you or someone else) and now you wish you could go back to the version from a week ago?

You can do that in Google files. Today, we dive into the wonderful world of detailed version history in Google files.

💎 Watch the video to see how you can find what was changed in a Google file, and/or revert to an earlier version.

❓ Have you tried this? 🔎

Need help with Google Workspace? Schedule a Discovery Session:

https://www.kloudgem.com/contact-us 

KloudGem tips: 

https://www.kloudgem.com/follow-resources/newsletter 

Protecting information vs. enabling users to do their jobs

As an organization's IT Department, it is your job to protect company information, BUT... 

...PROTECTING information and ENABLING users to do their jobs at the same time is really a balancing act. 

If we look at the big picture:

• A company exists to make money and at the same time, contribute to society.
• The company can only meet or exceed revenue targets if the employees' IT tools let them work efficiently. 
• Working efficiently often means working with external clients, partners, or vendors.

🔒 Your IT Department might be inclined to protect information by minimizing shareability outside the walls of the company. While this optimizes security, if it prevents people from working with external contractual parties, this will affect the company's earnings and will result in dissatisfaction with IT and the Google Workspace ecosystem that you worked so hard to deploy.

🔥🛠️ Moreover, employees are creative. If the company doesn't provide the approved channels they need to get their jobs done, they are likely to use unapproved software and personal Gmail addresses and other channels for sharing content with external contractual partners. This will result in IT entirely losing control over information flow; it will open up the company to information leaks — even permanently open leaks.

🔥🔓 In this way, too many protective measures can actually undermine the originally intended protection and CREATE the exact risks you were trying to avoid.

📃🔒 Companies need to formulate and enforce policies that protect information AND at the same time enable employees to do their work. 

💎This information management area is KloudGem's strong suit: we have worked cross-functionally with IT, IT Security, Legal, Operations, and user teams to formulate optimal policies for internal and external collaboration, while keeping information security and control over the flow of information front of mind to minimize said risks. 

🤝 This is the area where company policies and tech can strengthen one another to achieve the desired results. The key is coordinated internal cross-collaboration, with continuous improvement in mind.

Be a detective in Google Drive

If you need to find out details about a file in Google Drive, like who it's shared with, who created it, when and who modified it last, how big it is, etc. Do you know where to look for that info?

In this video, I'll show you a tiny but mighty little icon in Google Drive that holds all the info about a file. This is another tool for Sherlock Holmes when it's needed.

💎 Watch the video to see how you can find out about the history and activities that happened to a Google Drive file.

❓ Have you tried this? 🔎

Need help with Google Workspace? Schedule a Discovery Session:

https://www.kloudgem.com/contact-us 

KloudGem tips: 

https://www.kloudgem.com/follow-resources/newsletter 

Be a detective in Google Sheets

Have you ever found yourself doing detective work in Google Sheets, muttering to yourself: "I think this cell had something different in it yesterday….?"  

Yeah, me too. 

💎 In this video, I'll show you one way you can put on your Sherlock Holmes hat to find an inadvertent (or intentional?) change in a Google Sheet cell.

❓ Have you tried this? 🔎

Need help with Google Workspace? Schedule a Discovery Session:

https://www.kloudgem.com/contact-us 

KloudGem tips: 

https://www.kloudgem.com/follow-resources/newsletter 

Where to store files in Google Drive so you company doesn't lose track of key files

It's not enough to designate Google Drive as your main file storage at your company. Pay close attention to how your users understand and use this storage space.

When users are not trained, we have seen:

• Lost or inaccessible files
• Unnecessary downloads and uploads, leading to:
• Storage increase 
• Version control issues 
• Lack of accuracy 
• Non-collaborative work 
• Wasted time 

So here is a quick overview of the main differences and pros and cons of the two sections of Google Drive

My Drive

and

Shared drives 

If any of the issues look familiar, we are here to help with your document management strategy.

Sort your emails, automagically, in Gmail

One of the issues clients bring up regularly is their overflowing inboxes. With the amount of emails we all receive each day, both automated ones and from actual people, it can take so much time to sort through them all. So how about today we put Gmail to work to automate your email sorting.

💎 Watch the video to see how you can enlist Gmail to help you sort through your emails, automagically.

❓ Do you use filters in Gmail?

Fun fact: 

This video was created with the help of Google Vids; drop us a Comment if you would like to learn how. 😀

Need help with Google Workspace? Schedule a Discovery Session:

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KloudGem tips: 

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