Set up Essentials for your 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 Billing page 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

• Switch to Enterprise Essentials edition
• Switch to Enterprise Essentials Plus edition

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, work patterns, and collaboration.
• 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

• Verify your domain to unlock features (for email-verified accounts)

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

• Set up Essentials billing

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

• Sign in to your Admin console
• Open the Admin console from another app
• Recovering administrator access to your account

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

• Overview: Changing a Directory user's name or email address
• Reset a user's password

7

Manage video calls

Set up the video meeting features that you want your users to have.

Learn how

• Set up Meet for your organization

8

Manage chat collaboration

Set up the chat features that you want your users to have.

Learn how

• Overview: Manage Chat for an organization

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)

10

Manage calendars

(Optional) Turn on Calendar

Set up

• Turn Calendar on or off for users

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

• Turn on or off Gmail, Chat, and Meet smart features and personalization (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.

• Training and help for team members

13

Upgrade for more services

Ready for more? Upgrade to a Business or another Enterprise edition to add Gmail to your service suite.

Learn how

• Switch Google Workspace subscriptions