How teams leverage Giraffe alongside Google Workspace
A lot of teams these days are using Google Workspace (recently rebranded from G Suite) at work. We do here at Giraffe, and it’s pretty great. Google Workspace offers so many different benefits, but primarily it 1) gives your team email addresses that look like name@company.com vs name@gmail.com, and 2) gives your team storage and a suite of tools such as Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Meet, and Google Calendar.
Google Workspace is sweeping up a lot of new business, and winning over small teams because of 2 primary reasons, collaboration and practicality.
Collaboration
Google is synonymous with the internet, after all, it’s THE most visited website by a long shot. Combining a collaborative suite of tools alongside their email service and search makes them a behemoth with a lot of resources focused on making their tools highly collaborative.
A growing shift to storing docs in the cloud has made real-time collaboration commonplace. One of the stand-out features is the ability to add comments, tag teammates, and suggest edits directly in Google Docs/Slides/Sheets.
Also, multiple people can be working on a document at the same time which is incredible. You’ll see a ballet of colored cursors dancing around the screen, but this makes working so much more collaborative and quick.
We take this for granted these days, but pre-cloud, the norm was to send versions back and forth via email with countless edits and suggestions. With real time edits and version control, it’s awesome to see how much improvement has been made in this space! Collaborating with your team in Google Workspace (Google Drive specifically) is intuitive and easy to follow. It’s also asynchronous, allowing teams to see comments and make suggestions whenever it makes sense for everyone — no more waiting around for a particular email to come back with the latest version doc.
Whoever creates a file in Google Drive can easily share their content with whomever they choose. On every document and in every folder, you have control of who can see it/edit it/comment on your content:
Practicality
Oh yea, Google Workspace is also super practical, intuitive, and easy to use. Email notifications, tagging, track changes, and sharing make this tool incredibly easy to use and work with.
While Google Slides may not be as robust as PowerPoint or Sheets not as advanced as Excel, they absolutely get the job done for the majority of users. With seamless integrations into common workflows, it is no coincidence that so many teams are actively using Google Workspace.
Some concerns that users have voiced with Google Drive, in particular, are byproducts of usage. Depending on usage, folders and permissions in Google Drive can get a little crazy, making navigation to relevant docs hard to sometimes locate. Additionally, some companies have not fully adopted Google Workspace and various teams may also use other alternatives i.e. Office 365, making files and docs hard to locate across different systems. This is a common issue, particularly when working with vendors and customers who may be native Office 365 customers, making collaboration more difficult. Each team always ends up using the tool they like the most resulting in siloed docs and content spread across several apps. Finding the right information across a bunch of different apps can be frustrating, and that’s a big reason why we created Giraffe! Giraffe gives you a unified search experience across all of these tools, so you can get a bird’s eye view of you and your team’s working docs.
How to best leverage Google Drive (Part of Google Workspace) alongside Giraffe.
Most of our customers use Google Drive and a question we hear on occasion is how to best leverage Giraffe alongside it.
If you create docs in Google Drive, keep doing that, it’s an awesome tool. Think of Giraffe as the best way to search and find this information moving forward. We make it easy to locate whatever you’re looking for, whether it’s in Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, OneDrive, Evernote, Notion, Slack etc.
No changes to your workflow are needed on the Google Drive side. Continue to create docs in Google Drive. We’ve found that choosing the right folder/location for a Google Doc is often an exercise in and of itself. The main question we ask ourselves whenever creating a Google Doc is who should this be shared with? Determining the audience helps us to determine where we create the document, but that’s it…no need to nest it in 5 different sub folders.
The next time you create a folder in Google Drive, we recommend setting view/edit permissions at the highest parent folder level in Google Drive as these permissions will trickle down to the content underneath. Setting permissions at the document level starts to get confusing very fast — if there are certain docs that are more restricted/private you can always create those in a different folder altogether, shared with a smaller audience.
After your document has been created in Google Drive you’re able to add it to Giraffe with our bookmark extension in just one click. *Google Drive Integration on near-term roadmap! We’re excited too!*
After clicking the bookmark extension, a new Giraffe tab will open, centralizing this piece of content for you and your team to centrally locate moving forward.
In this example, the Kickoff Presentation from Google Slides has now been added to Giraffe. Simple as that. Regardless of whether this presentation ends up in an email thread, gets posted in a Slack channel, or ends up being attached to an Asana board… when a week goes by and you’re looking for this Kickoff Presentation, you can search for it in Giraffe with a few keywords and we’ll let you know right where it is within seconds.
Teams are actively adding and curating content to Giraffe to locate important docs right away regardless of whether they're in Google Drive or not. Sound cool? We’d love to hear your feedback! Join our waitlist for a free trial and we’ll be in touch very soon!
Where can I learn more about Google Workspace?
Read more about Google Workspace here
❤️ The Giraffe Team
