Five Must Have Tools for Google Apps

Google Apps offers cloud-based office suite that includes tools for better collaboration and communications. Whether you are a small business who recently switched to Google Apps or a large organization that wants to get the most of the cloud solution, consider that there are many plugins that can leverage your Google Apps experience.

Google Apps Backup

Google’s data center is one of the most secure environments in the world, but they can’t protect your data from human error. If you accidentally delete a file or record, it may be lost forever since Google is obligated to carry out your requests and can’t tell if the request was accidental or malicious. It is your responsibility to minimize the risk of user-driven data loss.

[Spanning: Backup for Google Apps]

Spanning ensures your organization's Google Apps data is protected from costly, and sometimes catastrophicdata loss – allowing you to get data back exactly the way it was in just a few clicks. Spanning Backup for Google Apps is the top-rated backup and recovery solution on the Google Apps Marketplace. It provides automatic, daily backup and recovery for Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Contacts and Sites - and, it comes with the industry’s only 100% Restore Guarantee.

Google Apps Training

If you recently switched to Google Apps or new staff has joined, training is always required for an efficient use of Google Apps. Boost eLearning’s Google Apps Training helps your employees develop the skills needed to communicate, collaborate and create additional value with Google Apps. It provides video tutorials for various Google Apps services in 11 different languages, including Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin Simplified), Chinese (Mandarin Traditional), English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish, and Spanish Latin American.

[Boost eLearning: Google Apps Training]

Document Approval

When it comes to the collaboration with Google Docs in your Google drive, obtaining approval from a group of people for a project, a proposal, a contract, or some other important document can be very difficult and frustrated experience. Also, it would be hard to record their approval if you send people in e-mail or share the documents to  request responses.

Collavate, a Collaborative Document Workflow Suite for Google Drive can enable you to avoid these hassles. In Collavate, you can design approval processes in parallel or sequential order. Simply add team member’s Email addresses, and save a list of reviewers as a favorite that you frequently co-work with them.  

It’s available on Google Apps Marketplace, as well as Add-ons for Google Docs and Google Sheets.

[Collavate: Document Workflow Suite]

[Collavate Add-ons for Google Docs and Google Sheets]

Project Management

Need to handle multiple projects and coordinate teams to collaborate and manage schedule via Gantt-chart like dashboard? Smartsheet is an online work and project management app that works seamlessly with Google Apps. Organize projects, track due dates, and collaborate in real-time with Smartsheet’s familiar spreadsheet interface, interactive Gantt charts, attachments, and more. Spend less time tracking people down and more time working with built-in task management features such as alerts, reminders, and status symbols.

Smartsheet makes it easy for Google users to get up and running with the option to import Google Sheets, attach files from Google Drive, and update tasks from within Gmail. The flexible nature of Smartsheet makes it an excellent tool for project management and so much more.

[SmartSheet: Project Management For Google Apps]

Invoice and Expense Management

Your accounting can also be simplified by taking advantage of cloud-based applications. FreshBooks is one of the most popular choices by small business owners because it’s incredibly easy-to-use and does not require you to learn accounting to get started. You can send invoices, track your time, capture expenses, accept credit cards, and run reports. FreshBooks is available for both iOS and for Android.

[Freshbooks: Accounting Management For Google Apps]

Your Choice

Depending on the industry that you are in, your organization’s required tools will be varied. Also, you may be required to develop in-house cloud based applications instead of buying packaged SaaS tools.  

The bottom line is, with these tools based on Google Apps, you have more options to better fulfill your needs of IT solution.

How to simply manage multiple user profiles in Chrome

If you have multiple Google accounts, Chrome's profile management feature is really useful.

Chrome’s multiple profile feature provides an easy way for multiple people or accounts to use the same browser without worrying about accounts conflicts or having to constantly sign in and out of Google profiles.

For example, if you own a personal Gmail account as well as Google Apps Gmail for your business, you can add multiple accounts within a user profile window. When you click one of a profile, it will open a new window.

However, current profile management feature is cumbersome as you need to click a profile on the upper right position of the bar and click Switch person link.  And then, in a user profile management pop-up window, you need to select a user profile to create a new window.

Did you know that there is a way to avoid multiple clicks and further make it easier to access to your profiles in two clicks?

As you see below screenshot, if you click a photo icon, it will expand to show all google accounts within a comprehensive way.  And you can simply tick one of profile to open a new window. Simple and comprehensive, isn't it?

In order to enable this, open a new tab in your chrome browser. Enter chrome://flags in your address bar.

And then, you will visit Chrome’s Experimental feature page to find 'hidden advanced settings of your chrome browser.  You can get all new features which didn't officially release and further adjust chrome configurations.  Please note that this is advanced menu so be cautious before you establish any changes as it will affect your entire chrome environment.

Press Ctrl-F and Search for "Enable new profile management system" and change setting to Disabled.

Now, click 'Relaunch Now' button at the bottom of the screen.  It will close your chrome browser and reopen and you can see your profile photo on the left side.

About the Author: Harry is a certified Google for Work sales, change management mastery and Google for Education trainer. Harry is also a Google Site experts and a creator of Google Street ViewTM Movie maker service.