Workspace Essentials Starter, a new free tier of Google’s Workspace suite, has been announced. It basically allows employees to collaborate with their coworkers using Google Docs, Sheets, Chat, and other tools without having to switch to Gmail if they’re currently using Exchange or Zoho. While employees have long been able to duplicate this use case using their personal Google accounts, having an official solution for it could help with security and make managing a team of people easier.
Users will be able to join up for Essentials Starter using their current email accounts, according to Google’s blog post, and then invite their coworkers to collaborate on projects with them. Google is giving each user 15 GB of Drive storage, which isn’t much for sharing media files but should be enough for text docs, slide shows, and spreadsheets. Employees will be able to communicate with one another using Chat and Meet even if the plan does not include email.
Essentials Starter might infiltrate IT departments like a Trojan horse.
Workspace Essentials Starter, according to Google, is intended to make it “simple for employees to choose their own productivity tools and bring modern collaboration to the workplace.” That appears to be beneficial to employees but somewhat inconvenient for IT. Ace As TechCrunch points out, the concept appears to be a Trojan horse in that it doesn’t require (or even allow for) the same level of administrative control over workplace tools as IT departments do. Workspace Essentials Starter might be a means to get employees used to and using Google’s tools.
Teams are limited to 25 people, according to a Google support website on the idea, but a company can sign up an infinite number of teams. There are, of course, limitations to what you can do with the free version – you won’t have Google support, and Meetings and Chats are all limited in comparison to the premium Enterprise Essentials plan. Essentials Starter will “spread out over a multiple-week period and may not be available in some regions until mid-February, 2022,” according to Google.
