Google Workspace is Google's answer to Microsoft's Office range of productivity apps and Apple's Pages, Numbers and Keynote. The core services include Google Docs for Word processing, Google Sheets for creating and editing spreadsheets and Google Slides, which covers presentations.
However, with its cloud-based suite, Google has cemented itself as a hub of productivity in its own right. With the popularity of digitised services higher than ever before, Google Workspace is widely-used by businesses and individuals alike.
Beyond its own offerings, Google has included a number of third party apps for download on its marketplace that integrate with Google Workspace. The best Google apps for business allow managers and employees alike to become even more effective while working on the move.
DocuSign eSignature
DocuSign aims to make the digital signature process more streamlined, while keeping documents within your Google Workspace. Documents can be turned into agreements to be signed by third parties, with electronic signatures captured by the service and transferred directly into the document of choice.
The service boasts 99% uptime for a reliable and secure document signing experience that businesses can rely on, and aims to put businesses at ease with features such as threat detection and enhanced ID verification integrated with Google Workspace.
Trello for Gmail
Trello is a visual tool for tracking projects, workflows and to-do lists. Its Google Workspace app integrates directly with Gmail, in order to keep employees and management alike productive and reminded of the most important tasks of the day.
The app converts emails into Trello ‘to do’ cards, to provide a more visual and navigable version of a user’s inbox, as well as to ensure that older emails aren’t simply buried at the bottom of the inbox. With the ability to organise your team’s board from directly within Gmail, Trello advertises itself as indispensable to teams working on customer feedback and event organisation.
Kanbanchi: Task and Project Management
Kanbanchi is enterprise-level project management and task-management software with kanban board and real-time team collaboration, which fully integrates with Google apps. Users can manipulate boards as files in Google Drive, give flexible access permissions, and push dates to Google Calendar through the app’s central interface.
Kanbanchi: Task and Project Management
Lucidchart
Lucidchart is a diagramming and visualisation app that integrates with Google Drive, Slack, Atlassian and many more. It can help in building flowcharts, ERDs, network diagrams, UML diagrams, and more. Diagrams can be shared with colleagues for real-time feedback and simultaneous editing. It also claims to be the only web app to offer complete support for Microsoft Visio documents.
AppSheet
This add-on can be used to create a custom mobile app from a Google spreadsheet in just a few minutes, through no-code development. Users can start with a spreadsheet that has data structured as a table. Using the Google Drive user interface, users can open spreadsheet file with AppSheet. AppSheet can then turn this into a mobile app which users can modify how the data gets displayed on the app and use advanced features such as mapping, forms, charting, and more.
Boomerang
This add-on allows users to track if someone replies to an email, and set reminders on important messages. It features response tracking to help users remember to follow up with people if they don't hear back from them — although this is now integrated within Gmail by default.
Boomerang also offers users a "send later" function, which allows for messages to be scheduled to be sent at a later date. The app suggests a number of common times at which the email can be sent, or alternatively users can set a specific time manually, and as the function is managed on Boomerang’s own server, there is no need for the user to be logged in at the time the message is sent.
