Use this guide to set up additional Google Workspace Essentials features for your domain. To set up these features, you must be the owner or IT admin for your organization's domain.
1
Sign up with your business email address
Sign up for Essentials Starter with the email address at the domain where you plan to use Essentials. The address should be one where you can currently get mail.
Note: You can't sign up with an address at a public web host like gmail.com or yahoo.com. Instead, you must use a custom address, such as for a business or organization.
Alternatively, you can buy the Enterprise Essentials or Enterprise Essentials Plus edition through a Google Sales representative or local reseller .
2
Upgrade to Enterprise Essentials or Enterprise Essentials Plus
If you signed up for the Essentials Starter edition, go to the Billingpage in the Google Admin console and upgrade your subscription to Enterprise Essentials or Enterprise Essentials Plus.
Or, you can upgrade to either edition during the domain-verification process in the next step.
Learn how
3
Verify your domain to unlock more features
If you upgrade to Enterprise Essentials, you can unlock these features:
- User (identity) management features, such as the ability to create user accounts and manage user profiles
- Advanced security features, such as admin-managed 2-Step Verification and password monitoring and enforcement
If you upgrade to Enterprise Essentials Plus, you can unlock the aforementioned features and these additional ones:
- Data loss prevention (DLP)—Define rules that protect privacy and prevent users from sharing sensitive content in Google Drive with people outside of your organization.
- Trust rules—View, edit, or delete trust rules.
- Cloud Identity Premium—Access enterprise security, app management, and automated device management.
- Context-Aware Access—Create granular access-control policies based on attributes, such as user identity, location, device security status, and IP address.
- Access transparency—Review logs of actions taken by Google staff when accessing user content.
- BigQuery access to admin audit logs—Export admin access logs for analysis in BigQuery.
- Work Insights—Access a reporting tool to get detailed metrics on your users’ Google Workspace adoption.
- Data regions—Choose one geographic location for all users in your organization and access advanced features, such as choosing different locations based on organizational unit or group and reporting and auditing.
- Client-side encryption—Let users add another layer of encryption to Drive files, emails, and more.
Unlock features by verifying that you or your organization owns your domain. You'll then assume full administrative control of all Essentials user accounts in your organization.
Learn how
4
Set up a new billing account for your domain
After you verify your domain, you must set up a new billing account. Do this even if you already set up billing as an email-verified customer in step 1 of this guide. To protect your data, we delete billing accounts that were set up for an email-verified service.
Learn how
5
Access your administrator account
After you verify your domain, you'll manage all services, users, and security controls from your Google Admin console. If you previously managed your Essentials team using the Team dashboard in Drive, you'll now do these tasks in the Admin console.
Learn how
6
Set up and manage your team
Use your Admin console to set up and manage your users' accounts and contact information.
Set up
- Options for adding users
- Make a user an admin
- Turn a service on or off for Google Workspace users
- Manage the user Directory for a company or school
Learn how
9
Work with cloud storage & online docs
Import your organization's files to Google Drive. Set up file storage and sharing options. Then, discover a powerful suite of document, spreadsheet, and presentation apps that you work with in your browser.
Set up
- Migrate your organization's data to Google Workspace
- Manage external sharing for your organization
- Turn custom Drive templates on or off for users
- What you can do with Sites
- Get started: Drive setup guide for admins
Learn how
- Get started with Drive in Google Workspace (cloud storage)
- Get started with Docs in Google Workspace (online documents)
- Get started with Sheets in Google Workspace (spreadsheets)
- Get started with Slides in Google Workspace (presentations)
11
Set up your organization's account
Add your logo. Then, depending on your business needs, you can set up additional account security features.
Learn how
- Add your logo to Google Workspace
- Set up 2-Step Verification
- Enforce and monitor password requirements for users
- Security checklist for small businesses (1-100 users)
Region specific
12
Train your users
Get training guides, tips, customer examples, and other resources to help your users work smarter and master Essentials for the workplace.
