Google Apps for Work is no more: meet G Suite

Google Apps for Work has officially been rebranded as G Suite.

According to Google, the new name better reflects its mission "to help people everywhere work and innovate together, so businesses can move faster and go bigger".

In substance, though, not much has immediately changed. As with Google Apps for Work, G Suite still comprises Gmail, Docs, Drive Calendar and Hangouts, although these have also received some new features.

Google Drive on Android now has Quick Access, which the company claims "saves about 50% of the time an employee would usually spend finding a file". Google Calendar's "find a time" function, which provides smarter scheduling, is now available on iOS.

Google Docs as a whole, meanwhile, now has "Explore", which covers a multitude of sins. In Google Sheets, the spreadsheet element of Docs, Explore allows users to use natural language processing to make the creation of formulae easier. In Slides, Explore "dynamically generates design suggestions, based on the content of [the user's] slide".

Use Explore in the word processing tool Docs meanwhile, and the word processing tool will "automatically recommend related topics to learn about, images to insert and more content to check out in Docs on your Android, iPhone or the web".

Cloud storage product Google Drive now better reflects its B2B purpose as a hub for work files, with the addition of a feature called Team Drives. This allows teams to manage content ownership and sharing options, and gives more granular control over that content. New team members can get instant access to all the files they need in one place, and a departing member can simply be removed from a team.

While the G Suite rebranding - which can be read about in full here - is pitched as an effort to align the product's name with its mission, it seems that the "Google" brand is becoming an endangered species. Since the company restructured to become Alphabet last year, Google X has become X, Google Ventures has become GV, Google Life Sciences has become Verily, and Google Ideas has become Jigsaw.

19/09/2016: Google for Work to become Google Cloud?

Google may be about to change the name of its Google for Work service to Google Cloud, according to anonymous sources, with high hopes to take over from Amazon as the most used cloud suite of applications and services.

In fact, The Information, which apparently has the exclusive intel, said Chromebooks and Android will also come under that umbrella too as they're currently part of the company's Google for Work division.

"The name change is Google's way of saying, 'We have the best cloud platform, period,'" the source told The Information. However, as the source remains to be anonymous, it's all very uncertain at this time whether it's just someone telling porkies or if it's a real leak.

Google's Cloud boss Diane Greene apparently sent an email to Google employees about the changes two weeks ago, but they've all been sworn to secrecy for the time being, as is usually the case with such big announcements. The Information expects Google to make the announcement at its Google Cloud event at the end of September.

Google For Work brings all of Google's business-centric services and apps together including Mail, Drive, Inbox, Maps, Chromebooks and its mobile operating system, Android, which all make life easier for businesses.

It has been suggested that the move has been taken to show its main competitors (Amazon and Microsoft) that its cloud services mean business, whether being used by enterprises or consumers.

Previously, Google publicly said it feels Google For Work was the most suitable name for its business service because it accurately reflects what it was designed to do - make working simpler.