Lots of educators use Google Workspace at their school, but many are unaware that Workspace comes in three different editions, each with a slightly (or substantially) different set of features. The three editions are Fundamentals, Standard and Plus. In a future post I want to unpack the additional features in the Plus edition of Workspace and explain what you get for your money that’s additional to the other editions.
Before we go there though, let’s have a quick history lesson to put this all into perspective. Google began providing cloud based software to users way back in 2004 with the release of Gmail. Two years later in 2006, they added a calendar and a beta version of an online word processor based on the acquisition of Writely, and which came to be known as Google Docs. They also added Google Spreadsheets (which would become simply Sheets) and Google Docs Presentations (which would become Google Slides) in 2006, and gradually kept adding tools to the suite. These were all still just standalone apps, but the release of Google Drive in 2012 really unified everything together as a “suite” with cloud storage. The suite, which had expanded over the years with other tools like Sites, Drawings, Forms, etc, became collectively known as Google Apps, and even offered a version that could be customised for use within an organisation, called Google Apps for your Domain. Catchy.
In 2016 it was renamed as G Suite, and was still a completely free product. Then in 2020, they renamed it again, now calling it Google Workspace, and started to offer different editions, with additional features, at an additional price.
I was working at Google during this re-brand to Google Workspace for Education and the introduction of the paid editions of Workspace. Like any big change (and the move from being a free product to a paid product was a really big change!) it had some challenging moments. Users wanted to know what the additional benefits were, and why they should start paying for a product that they had been getting for free for so long. And in the beginning, I’m not sure that Google did a particularly great job of explaining the differences.
There were originally four different editions – one free and three paid – and the added complexity of having different versions where there used be only one, made it hard to differentiate them clearly. The Fundamentals Edition was the continuation of the free edition, and Google committed to retaining this free version of Workspace for any school that wanted to use it. The Standard Edition was the same as Fundamentals from the perspective of end users, but came with a bunch of back-end technical security and admin management features to excite the network admin folk. The Teaching and Learning Edition had none of those additional admin features, but came with some additional features for educators, mainly in Google Classroom and Google Meet. Finally, the Plus Edition had all the features of both the Standard and the Teaching and Learning Editions rolled into one, with some additional Drive storage as well.
From a user perspective, most of the value of the Plus Edition of Workspace revolved around the growing list of paid features in Classroom and Meet. The additional features in Meet, like recording, breakout rooms, security controls, etc were really important in 2020, when we were all in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and so many schools were suddenly dealing with remote learning, but it became a much harder sell as schools returned to face to face teaching. (The fact that Google was “building the plane while flying it”, urgently adding new features to Meet in order to keep up with market-leader Zoom, wasn’t helping). Likewise, loading additional paid features into Google Classroom, which was never really designed to be a remote teaching solution but clearly emerged as one during the pandemic, felt a lot less relevant as schools returned to normal. And really, the feature you were paying for in Classroom – unlimited use of Originality Reports was hard to justify while free users could still use them in a slightly more limited way. And so as the sales teams at Google kept ramping up the message about the value of paying for Workspace Plus, the actually value proposition was becoming harder to justify as the need for these paid features, particularly in Google Meet, started to wane.
Now, that said, Google did eventually start to greatly broaden the value proposition for the paid editions by adding more additional features, while also got a lot better at explaining what that value proposition was. Gradually, education systems started to understand the additional features and benefits of the paid editions, and now most education systems in Australia and New Zealand are on board. Departments of Education in NSW, VIC, ACT, SA, NZ, most of the Catholic dioceses around Australia, and many, many independent and private schools are all now experiencing the benefits of Workspace Plus.
That said, I think it’s fair to say that if you asked the average teacher which version of Google Workspace they are using, they would not be able to tell you. And almost nobody can tell you what the differences between editions are, if indeed they even know that there are differences at all.
When people ask “what extra features do I get in the Plus edition?”, they can always go to this page where Google outlines the extra features. It’s somewhat useful, but I’ve never found this page entirely satisfying because it leaves out a lot of the smaller differences. Smaller differences that add up to a significantly larger difference.
With this preamble of a history lesson, my next post is going to take you through what those differences are, and lay out all the little extras that you get with Workspace for Education Plus. Stay tuned.
