Dogfooding Google Workspace at Pythian

At Pythian, our day-to-day activities often involve Google, where we’re the client—not the partner or implementor.

As a data and analytics services company, dogfooding our own solutions is an important aspect of our business. We gain valuable insights into their pros and cons, scalability, and even the occasional discovery of a bug (or feature.)

Google Workspace

As a Google Workspace implementer, our productivity software of choice is, of course, Google Workspace. At Pythian, we utilize the full suite from the basics like Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Chat, Drive, and Meet. Using these products day-to-day, you will quickly start to realize the effort that Google has put into intra-company collaboration, which is just there.

With real-time editing and commenting features, Google Workspace enables team members to provide instant feedback, make suggestions, and collaborate on projects in a dynamic and efficient manner. No more worrying about managing versions and long email threads about who has the ball with the current version of the document.

This integration just melts into the background with the other applications, preferring to email a document; the system just automatically gives you a link to a shared document rather than a copy of the document, which will need to be merged later. This type of integration continues throughout the application suite, ensuring that your experience is top-notch. 

All of this also works directly on your phone with a full suite of applications to handle anything you might need directly on the run on your phone or tablet. 

You will also quickly find with Google that once you are using the better-known applications, some of the lesser-known products which you could use in day-to-day life are fully available as well.   

• Want to get some information from a larger group of people: Forms
• Need to track some lists of things: Keep
• Just need to track some todos: Tasks
• Google Meet Livestream enables seamless broadcasting of meetings, events, and presentations to a wide audience, in-house, cross domains, and even publicly on Youtube.

And really, all of this is just scratching the surface as you can get much more advanced with things like App Script or one of the many APIs if your business needs require them. 

Within Workspace, Pythian has:

• Accounts: 500
• Gmail
  • 100,000 emails/day
• Drive total usage: 10TB
  • Gmail – 3 TB
  • User Drives – 5 TB
  • Shared Drives – 2 TB
• Mobile devices managed: 254 
• Meet 
  • Meetings: 1450 (30 days)
  • Attendees: 6000 / day
  • Active Users: 428 
  • Avg minutes/meeting: 32
• Chat active users: 189 

All of this with a very straightforward setup and practically no maintenance other than security monitoring and user on and off-boarding procedures.

Finally, you also can help yourself more with the many product improvements and features that Google Workspace is constantly delivering, like the soon-to-be-released Duet AI for Google Workspace. This will bring the next generation of tools to productivity suites with the security and reliability that we all need.

Conclusion

This just scratches the surface of Pythian’s overall offerings to our customers but shows some of the dedication of our teams to practice what we preach.