So you’re new to Google Workspace (G Suite) and are looking to understand the best way to get things set up for your organisation. If you haven’t done so already, you may want to get assistance from a Google Workspace Partner, we’d recommend Bespin Labs as a partner with over a decades worth of experience in helping organisations configure and install Google Workspace.

In this article, we’ll share with you the details on what’s required to get started with Google Workspace.

Quick Google Workspace Guide

Here is our quick guide on what you will need to set up and correctly manage Google Workspace.

Access to Admin Console

• Sign in to Admin Console
  • In any web browser (we’d recommend Google Chrome), go to admin.google.com
  • From the sign-in page, enter your business email address.
  • If you see a list of Google Accounts on the sign-in page, make sure you are choosing your Google Admin account. (It will not be the one ending with @gmail.com)

Set up your Business Email

If by chance, you haven’t activated your Gmail account, then you can do it now. You need to change MX records to direct email to Google’s email servers. We would also recommend at this point setting up an SPF record. Don’t worry if that sounds all complicated we’ve created an article specifically on this topic. (How to secure your Google Workspace email environment with SPF, DKIM and DMARC.)

• Activate your Gmail Account for Google Workspace (make changes in MX records)
• Make sure about the mail delivery
• Secure your email and prevent spoofing with SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
• Provide an additional ‘alias’ address

Transfer team’s data to Google Workspace

• Import all details: user emails, contact details, calendars to Google Workspace domain
  • Google has a wealth of tools available free of charge that will help you migrate all your legacy data over to Google Workspace.
  • Contact a Google Workspace partner who can help you perform your migration.

Manage your Team

Build team members account and manage them accordingly:

Set up

• Add all team members account
  • Don’t forget to add further information such as Job Title, Department, Manager and phone numbers to your users profile. These details will be extremely important for Patronum to function.
• Also, add your other domains, such as an alias if you have multiple brands, or secondary domains if you support multiple businesses within your group.
• Then, make another user as administrator
• You can turn on or off service for the users
• For this, you can change users profile and email id’s
• And then reset the password.

Set up Organization’s account

You also need to set up an organization’s account to manage the bills and the good practices for security purposes.

• Put Organization’s logo
• Set up 2-Step verification
• Then, manage billings and payments
• Follow the best practices for security
  • It may be best to get a qualified Google Workspace partner such as Bespins Labs involved in performing a security review to make sure you start off on a good footing.

Manage your Meeting and Mails

• Organize your contacts
• Create mailing groups (See how Patronum can help you create dynamic groups)
• Also, create a team calendar
• Then, manage access to the calendar

Organize and Manage Files

Set up

• Files sharing and permission allowance
• Create official file templates for your Organization

Install Patronum

Now here’s the thing. While you are starting to add your users, creating Google Groups, Contact and set up Google Drive now is a perfect time to install Patronum from the Google Workspace Marketplace.

First, let’s understand how the Patronum works in managing your team members.

Onboarding Process

Using the information already now stored within the Google Workspace Directory, Patronum can automatically use this information to perform a number of task via a policy. This means that all users matching the policy are treated in exactly the same way. Below are just a few examples of things that Patronum can do automatically.

• Create a label and an email filter to apply the label, and even a star, for all users via a policy. Great when you want to make sure all employees see important company announcements.

• Standard Email Signature for all Users, even add Google Analytics to your signatures.
• Add users to Google Groups dynamically
• Safely remove users from your organisation following a deprovisioning policy.

Contact Information

Patronum provides you with better visibility and management over your Google contact:

• Open Patronum
• Tap the ‘Contacts’ from the Menu
• Under Contacts, there comes three ways of contact management: Shared Contacts, Google Contacts, and Contact Sharing

Shared Contact

These are the central contacts in your Google directory, also known as External Shared Contacts. From here you can create contact information which will appears globally across all Google Workspace applications as part of the Google Address book. You can add 3rd party suppliers, customers and other stakeholders in order to maintain accurate information for your business.

Google Contacts

This section shows everyone’s contacts from their Google address book (contacts.google.com). This helps local administrators provide better support to users, and also assists with complying with GDPR rules giving organisations visibility of personally identifiable information stored in individual users address books.

Contact Sharing

Patronum allows users to share their Google Contacts with other within the same domain. As an administrator you can also configure contact sharing for your users. From here we can select a particular user and their labeled contacts and share those contacts with others within the company. We can also share company contacts from the Google Directory with others within the organisation. This feature is particularly handy if you have iOS users who want to have access to company contact details on their devices.

Conclusion

When it comes to setting up your Google Workspace environment it’s important to pick and implement the right tools to support you. Patronum is the riches Google Workspace management tool available on the Google Marketplace to date. It’s designed and developed by real Google Workspace administrators who have years of experience. Installing Patronum means you’ll be taking advanced from their experience as well as the experience of the Patronum user community.

Want to learn more, get in touch, schedule a demo, or check out our YouTube channel.