- So I'm loving the unified experience.
You can see here, this is something else
that is on the horizon, and that is the ability
to actually have a Google Meet running inside a document.
Now, who's ever had this problem?
You've been on a Google Meet
and you're working on a document with a colleague,
for me, that's pretty much every day,
and you know, you're either constantly switching
between tabs or, you know, you forget
that they're in a background tab
and you're picking your nose,
and then all of a sudden they can see,
or maybe you've got, you know, a screen
and you've got the two tabs open and you're trying
to kind of like, you know, juggle the windows around.
That's what I end up doing.
When I'm traveling and on the road,
I actually take a second device, I take my laptop,
and I take an iPad Pro just as a dedicated meeting device,
and so this picture-in-picture here
of being able to have your Meet
inside your documents, as you're talking,
have it as a picture-in-picture
is just absolutely bloody epic.
I can't wait for that because I know
I'm gonna be using that pretty much every day,
and my marketing manager Angel, who's in the background
helping produce this live video
is I'm sure frothing at that, 'cause we will spend
hours at a time sometimes, working on things together,
and it's gonna make it very very easy to work together.
So Google's big idea here
is all of your work, now in one place,
and so it's about consolidating the applications.
Yes, they've brought out new logos and that kinda thing.
Yes, they've given this a new name,
but it's really about all of your work in one place,
and what that means is Google
are really focusing on a unified experience.
It's gonna be interesting how they do that
in the browser, you know, with the Microsoft suite
of tools, which I guess is the competitor to Google,
you've got all different apps
and you kinda go to different apps
for different specific purposes,
but Google being in the browser, consolidating things
in workspaces that kind of, you know, gel together nicely.
It's certainly quite interesting.
The one thing that I'm kinda missing
from the unified workspace right this second
is being able to have Cloud Search, which is a feature
of what was G Suite Business, soon to change,
that Cloud Search functionality,
I'd love to have that inside the Gmail
so that I can search and find stuff
in my Google Drive and open a document,
'cause right now, if I wanna open something from Drive,
I've either got to open a new tab to Cloud Search,
or I've gotta open a new tab into Google Drive,
so I'd love to have a unified search right inside of Gmail.
I think they are adding some operators inside of Gmail
so you can find documents and stuff,
but it's not always great.
So I'd love to see them improve that.
So we've talked about all your work in new place.
There are now two families
of business plans or two families
of Google Workspace plans.
Now, there is a Business family and an Enterprise family.
Many of our audience are small business owners,
and I know a number of you who are watching the video
currently live are small business owners.
For you, the Business plans are gonna be
the only ones that are relevant.
The Enterprise plans are for businesses
that are over 300 users.
So if you've got 300 users, you have to switch
to an Enterprise plan, more information on that soon,
but there are also three tiers of Enterprise plans
with different options available with them.
So the three Business plans are Business Starter,
Business Standard, and Business Plus
I've got the dollars here in Australian dollars,
although they have changed in the last 24 hours
by about a dollar each,
and so, they may be subject to change.
Just keep note on that.
I believe those prices are including GST,
but again, they may be subject to change.
So just watch out for that, but Starter,
Standard, and Business Plus,
and now the three plans.
Now, Starter is equivalent to what was G Suite Basic,
and Standard is equivalent to what was G Suite Business.
Plus is a new plan, and what was G Suite Enterprise,
which a number of our customers have taken up,
you will fit into one of the three Enterprise plans.
They're not public, so I'm not gonna share
all of the pricing for those, but I'm gonna take you
through a few of those details and what they actually mean.
Now, the actual cutover for these new plans
is January 15, 2021.
So right now, you're gonna stay
on the current plan that you're on.
It won't be renamed or anything, but the actual changes
in the features of the plans,
and I believe the official changes
in the pricing of the plans
is not until January 15, 2021,
and if right now, you have a commitment contract,
so if you have a yearly contract and you've already paid
for the year, or maybe you've got a multi-year deal
if you've got a discount from us, and an agreement
where you've signed up for a number of years,
that will also extend until the end of that agreement.
If you took an upgrade offer
where you upgraded from Basic to Business,
or from Basic to Enterprise, and you've got a number
of years left on that, those will all be honored.
If you are on a flexible plan,
and you're just paying month to month,
January 15 is when you're gonna be cutover,
and of course, anyone who is renewing after January 15
on an annual, on a commitment plan,
on anything else, any other special deals,
from January 15 is when the new pricing
and the new feature changes will come into effect,
and there are definitely some impact feature changes,
which is why I'm gonna take you through these,
and you will see that there are some changes
to some of the different plans there.
So let's talk Business Starter.
This is what was the G Suite Basic plan.
Not much has really changed with this.
It's all pretty straightforward.
However, Google have dialed back the support.
So where you would previously be able to get
24-hour support for this plan,
it's now gonna be eight hours, five days support.
Now I can only assume that they're gonna police it somehow
based on the country that you're in,
and I'm not really sure how that's gonna work
for business owners and businesses that have staff
spread across different countries and different time zones.
It seems that like, a little bit of an odd choice.
I've no idea how it's gonna be policed,
but apparently, they're dialing back the support.
We'll see how that's actually implemented.
What I do know is that Google obviously have 24-hour support
because they have been providing it,
but also they've got, you know,
customers all over the world.
There's over six million businesses
subscribed to Google Workspace,
and so it's gonna be interesting how that happens.
Number two, what is being added
is some new Meet tools to Business Starter.
So there's a few very basic Meet tools
that are being added there.
Things like, and I've got to be careful with this,
so I don't accidentally share the wrong ones.
Live transcriptions, I think are already there,
but they are adding, I think the ability to raise your hand,
the ability to blur your background,
but most of the best features are actually being saved
for the next one up there.
Okay, so that's Business Starter,
equivalent to G Suite Basic,
not really much is changing there.
Business Standard is the next one,
which is equivalent to G Suite Business.
Now, most customers that we have are already
on G Suite Business because the phenomenal feature
of shared drives, if you're not already using shared drives
or if you're a business that's doing any kind of sharing
and file storage inside of Google Drive,
if you're not on at least what was Business,
and is now Business Standard,
then you've got rocks in your head
because it's an absolutely excellent, excellent feature,
and the number of things that Google are adding
to what is now the Standard plan is really quite exciting,
especially since the price is not really changing on this,
it's effectively staying the same.
So Meet recording, which was previously restricted
only for Enterprise plans has been,
and this is a complete surprise to us,
has now been added to Business Standard,
and I've gotta say like, this is most likely pressure
because of Zoom being able to record things
on, you know, any plan, even on a free plan,
I think you can record meetings,
and so you can now record inside Google Meet
and have it automatically saved into your Google Drive
on the Business Standard plan, which is pretty damn awesome.
Next up, some of the best features
of Google Meet that are about to be released,
like breakout rooms, QA, and running polls.
I've tested all of these features
and they are frickin' awesome.
They are all being rolled out to the Standard plan as well,
so they are all gonna come very soon.
So if right now, you're still a Zoomer,
and you're paying for that,
you'll be able to very soon ditch
that if there were, you know
if you're wanting the breakout rooms or QA
or it's the recording or whatever,
these are coming soon to the Business Standard plan,
which is absolutely awesome.
Well done, Google, thank you.
I've been saying this for a long time
that the recording should have come to the Business plan
and now it has, which is awesome.
Now, next one, a bit of a downside.
Google Vault has been removed.
It is now exclusively on the Plus plan,
which I think is a bit of a bummer,
'cause this is a pretty damn awesome tool,
and it's absolutely critical for anyone
in healthcare, financial services, legal or consulting,
or for anyone who, you know, really cares
about the compliance side of your business,
and making sure that if you ever get sued
or you have a project that goes bad,
that you can actually make sure you have a good backup
of all of the communications.
So that's a bit of a bummer that that's being removed.
You can still purchase it on a per-user basis.
That's gonna add up the costs.
You may consider to bump up to the Plus plan instead,
rather than buying Vault manually.
Next up, storage is changing.
Unlimited storage is going away
and Google are instead giving two terabytes
of storage per user.
Now I'm kind of in two minds about this.
It is a bit of a bummer that for many people who upgraded
to what was the Business plan to get access
to unlimited storage, that's now no longer available.
However, I will say there are not that many customers
that I would say would use more than two terabytes
of storage per user and Google have done the smart thing
and actually pulled that together.
So if you've got 10 staff in your business,
you get 20 terabytes of storage.
Honestly, I think you're gonna struggle to fill that.
We have 30, 40 staff, and we probably have four
or five terabytes of storage,
and that's mainly because we upload raw 4K videos
from our studio recordings,
and we've got all those sitting in Google Drive,
as well as everything else in our business,
backups from customers and all kinds of things.
So I'd say you'll probably struggle
to use all of that storage, but I believe
there will still be options to upgrade your storage
if you need additional storage on top of that.
So anyway, that's the storage situation,
and support is also being dialed back here.
It's 24 hours a day, but only five days.
Again, I don't know how that's gonna work
with the time zones, fairly interesting,
but that is what it is.
Okay, finally is the Business Plus plan,
and this one includes Google Vault,
includes some pretty awesome advanced
Google Meet transcription features.
So it will not only transcribe your Google Meetings,
but it will also do language translations
live, which is just frickin' awesome.
Maybe you're presenting to someone who's based
in different country or different language.
You can have, I think, it's about 200
to 250 people on a Meet.
That was previously reserved only for Enterprise,
so you can have massive teams joining Google Meets
and you've got that live real-time translation there,
which is pretty damn awesome, and you know, apart from that,
I don't think Plus like, blows me out
of the water with features there.
I think you'd have to be a specific kind of business
to wanna take up these features.
I also believe that Plus is a way of price positioning
the Business plan as the smartest plan,
what is now the Standard plan,
as the, you know, the most obvious choice,
but there's some great features here in Plus
if you do find that you need more.
If you were in any kind of consulting, legal,
any kind of business where, you know,
communication is absolutely vital for you to keep a copy
of, you'd wanna make sure you're on Plus
so you can get access to Google Vault
because that is an amazingly, amazingly useful
and important tool.
(logo whooshing)