Workspace Essentials Starter is a new free plan of Google’s Workspace suite. It essentially allows employees to utilize products like Google Docs, Sheets, Chat, and so on with their colleagues without having them change to Gmail if they are currently using something like Exchange or Zoho. While workers have long been able to recreate this use case using personal Google accounts, having an official solution for it might improve safety and make managing a team of individuals collaborating together simpler. 

Users will be able to register for Essentials Starter using their current email accounts, and will then be able to invite colleagues to collaborate on projects with them, as per Google’s blog article. Google is giving each user 15 Gigabyte of Drive storage, which isn’t a lot of space for sharing video files but should be enough for text docs, slide shows, and spreadsheets. Although the package does not include email, workers will be able to communicate with one another using Chat and Meet. 

Workspace Essentials Starter, according to Google, is intended to make it “simple for workers to pick their preferred productivity tools and bring contemporary collaboration to work.” That appears to be beneficial to workers but potentially inconvenient for IT. As IT Consultants note, the proposal appears to be a Trojan horse in that it does not need (or even permit) the extensive administrative control that IT departments sometimes have over workplace technologies. Workspace Essentials Starter may be a means to get employees acclimated to and using Google’s products. 

As per a Google support website for the plan, teams are restricted to 25 persons, but an organization may sign up an infinite number of teams. There are, of obviously, restrictions to what you can do with the free plan – you won’t have Google support, and Meetings and Chats all have certain restrictions when matched to the premium Enterprise Essentials plan. According to Google, Essentials Starter will be available “over a multiple-week span and may not be accessible in some areas until mid-February this year.”