Google announces free Workspace tier for firms that don't need its email

Google announced a new free tier of its Workspace suite, Workspace Essentials Starter. Basically, it allows workers to use tools like Google Docs, Sheets, Chat, etc. with their coworkers without having to switch to Gmail if they're already using something like Exchange or Zoho. While employees have long been able to replicate this use case with personal Google accounts, having an official product could help with security and make it easier to manage a team of people working together.

As per Google's blog post, users will be able to sign up for Essentials Starter using their existing email accounts and then be able to invite their co-workers to work on projects with them. Google provides 15GB of Drive storage for each user, which isn't a lot of space for sharing media files, but be able to hold plenty of text documents, slideshows, and spreadsheets. Although the plan doesn't provide email, employees will still be able to talk to each other using Chat and Meet.

Google says Workspace Essentials Starter is created to make it "easy for employees to choose their own productivity tools and bring modern collaboration to work." That sounds good for employees, but maybe a bit annoying for YOU. As TechCrunch points out, it sounds like the plan could act as something of a Trojan horse since it doesn't require (or even allow) the intense administrative control that IT departments sometimes exert over workplace tools, Workspace Essentials Starter could be a way to get workers used to using Google tools.

According to a Google support page about the plan, teams are limited to 25 people, but an unlimited number of teams can be registered in an organization. Of course, there are also limits to what you have access to with the free version: You won't get support from Google, and meetings and chats have some limitations compared to the paid Enterprise Essentials plan. Google says Essentials Starter will "roll out over a period of several weeks and may not be available in some regions until mid-February 2022."