Launch a successful Google Workspace Intranet using CentricMinds

39% of businesses flagged the introduction of digital collaboration platforms as being the most important factor in making remote work sustainable according to The 2021 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends survey.

However, if you are using Google Workspace, which includes Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and other Google apps, you will have noticed there is a key offering missing from the suite - a Google intranet product.

A G Suite Intranet? G Suite is now Google Workspace

G Suite is now Google Workspace, Google’s answer to integrating their workspace productivity apps. Trusted by enterprise outfits such as Nielsen and Salesforce, Google Workspace is now a viable market leader in the workplace apps space.

The case for a modern Intranet

“To attract, engage, and retain needed talent, companies must deliver a new kind of employee experience. This will require providing a technological experience at work that empowers employees to seamlessly collaborate and innovate.” Personalised and Customised: The future of employee experience 2019, KPMG.

Working collaboratively in the digital space isn’t just about concurrent document editing - like working on the same Google Doc as another person, or intelligent calendar apps - like a participant form embedded in a Google Calendar event. 

It’s about:

• Intelligent, personlized, synced integration with enterprise information sources and applications
• Insights and automation for both employees and employers into the digital workflows that we use and rely on
• Creating spaces where we can work intelligently across different areas, unbounded by trying to remember which app to use or where we kept a piece of information
• Reimagining the digital employee experience (DEX)

Intranet solutions are no longer static websites which are simply there to find (often outdated) business information, with only a few people in the enterprise holding the publisher keys.

A modern Intranet platform is an important and dynamic knowledge management solution for business customers.

It’s a way for your employees to both surface, share, and collaborate on workplace information quickly, discover and chat about new and relevant news and other internal communications, and learn more about their work ecosystem, perform training activities, and a whole lot more. 

It’s a way for employees and management to interact with business data, files, and apps in a way that makes more sense from a human perspective. And it’s cloud based, for on the go access across any device, and from any place.

‍Does Google Workspace need an Intranet? Yes, it does.

Which Google Workspace products and tools are you using? Is it Google Docs? Shared Google Calendars? User management with Google Groups? On its own, Google Workspace provides a great suite of products that integrate well with each other, but it doesn’t provide an overarching platform that can organize all of this business information in an intuitive and non-technical way. An Intranet can bring all this information together in a way that provides a more compelling digital employee experience.

Despite not having an Intranet-as-a-Service product under the Google Workspace umbrella, this doesn’t mean that it’s something your business can do without. 

Rather than investing in a whole new productivity suite that includes an Intranet product, along with an often complex migration plan, you can instead choose an Intranet product that simply plugs into Google Workspace instead.

You need to find a solution that has deep integration with Google’s apps and is easy to connect the dots. That’s where CentricMinds comes into play.

An Intranet is not a replacement for Google Workplace; it’s an enhancement.

Note: Google Sites is a Google Workplace product that is similar to an ‘old-school’ Intranet, with basic, static information. It doesn’t fulfil the qualities needed for a modern business Intranet that delivers a modern digital employee experience.

How to launch a successful Intranet

A successful Intranet is one which:

1. Is used as the main portal to company resources
2. Delivers excellent corporate communications 
3. Is available on any device, from anywhere
4. Provides powerful search capabilities to surface relevant information quickly
5. Is simple for all users to interact with
6. Has links to all appropriate data and applications
7. Is secure

Keeping this in mind, it’s easy to see why a Google workplace Intranet, one that combines the power of Google apps, is poised for success. From using the G Suite apps, you’ll be aware that each app already ticks the last five boxes - this is why they’ve become so wildly successful. All that’s missing is a modern Intranet platform that brings it all together.

Your Google workplace Intranet with CentricMinds

We developed the CentricMinds platform as a modern Intranet that anyone can use - not just the IT department, or skilled users in admin and management. It’s designed to take away the business pain that many of our customers consult with us about in competitor products, such as dealing with in-house custom developed solutions that fail to meet the mark, the need for external workflow management tools, and broken integrations.

It’s designed to just work, without adding significant management and maintenance overhead.

With CentricMinds, integration with Google Workspace is easy. If you’ve signed up for a free trial of the CentricMinds platform (which you can use out of the box) then you can follow the steps in our video to connect your Google Workspace.

From CentricMinds you can:

• Map Google Drive folders to CentricMinds Drive
• Preview Google files and version history from inside CentricMinds
• Tag and organize Google files, finding documents easily with our Enterprise Document Management System
• Synchronize Google People Directory for team directory, adding organisational aspects like location, projects and employee expertise 
• Add Google Calendar events and use two-way synchronisation for the CentricMinds calendar function
• Create workflows , triggers, and automations to enhance your Google Workspace apps all from within CentricMinds

Pull in the content you need from your Google cloud apps, then organise further to ensure the best employee experience from your intranet.

Before you begin: Tips for success

Create an Intranet project plan

Make sure that you’re building the right type of Intranet - one that us user-centric and drives successful employee engagement. How can you do this? By outlining a plan before you dive in. We have the how to guide here.

Make sure that your Google Workspace is in the right shape to hook up to the CentricMinds Intranet Software

Organise folders, files, user accounts, and calendars within Google Workspace before hooking up to your Intranet. The better organised that your workplace apps are before you begin, the better the outcome will be.

Empower your user base

Get employee buy-in before you launch. By asking employees what they’d like to see in your company Intranet you empower them by providing a way to shape your digital future - as well as avoid any blind spots that you may have missed.

Consider other integrations

CentricMinds can integrate seamlessly with other products such as Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Slack, Trello, and DropBox. Don’t miss out on adding other software integrations into your intranet for the full picture on your business data.

Have a consultation with our team

We’re here to help you create and run a successful Intranet. Get off on the right foot by speaking with us before embarking on your new Intranet project. We can walk through your current company digital infrastructure, provide advice in making your business data prepared for Intranet-readiness, suggestions about best practices for your organization, and how to segment your users for optimal workflows.