Zive
Bringing G Suite to the Desktop

Google’s enterprise offerings have expanded significantly over the last decade. They now include a broad range of applications and online services for businesses grouped under the G Suite brand umbrella, and are used by millions of corporate users around the world.

While the collaboration benefits of cloud-based apps like G Suite are clear, the main drawback continues to be that people are stuck using them in the web browser. The resulting functional limitations and poor user experience often frustrates users and can limit G Suite adoption within organizations.

In an effort to untether G Suite from these issues, Zive, a New York-based company, recently launched Kiwi for G Suite, which enables users to obtain a desktop-like experience for Gmail and light-weight productivity applications like Docs, Sheets, and Slides. In the Apple store, Zive’s popular consumer app, Kiwi for Gmail, has already established itself one of the highest rated apps in the productivity category with a 4.7-star rating. Their new enterprise application is unique in that it not only makes G Suite faster and more responsive compared to performance in browsers, but it also transforms G Suite into multi-windowed environment that looks and feels much more like Microsoft’s traditional Office suite.

The use of cloud-based applications like G Suite can raise security concerns for CIO’s since they mean that corporate email and important documents must coexist with a browser’s cache and cookies. “Security is one of the biggest concerns that CIOs have when adopting G Suite,” says Eric Shashoua, the CEO and founder of Zive. To improve security, Zive’s developers implemented a theoretical computer science research paper on securing banking websites. As a result, all the work employees do within Kiwi is completely and perfectly isolated from anything that goes on in the browser on their computers.

Kiwi takes G Suite apps and separates them from the browser so they exist on their own, as independent applications that are completely integrated with desktop OS and file systems.

We help CIOs ease the transition of rolling out G Suite and increase user adoption of the platform within their organization

It also eliminates the need for people to have different tabs opened for maintaining multiple e-mail accounts as all the applications are windowed within one holistic platform.

CIOs often find that getting everyone within their organization to embrace and adopt G Suite can be challenging. Long-time Outlook and Office users often resist change and miss the familiar features and feel of working with Outlook, MS Office or services like Dropbox. This can result in extra cost for IT departments that feel compelled to continue to pay for Office licenses to accommodate these employees. Kiwi is an extremely useful tool for those rolling out G Suite because it minimizes this kind of disruption by offering all users an alternative way of accessing G Suite apps that might better align with the way they work. By increasing user adoption, Kiwi often enables companies to cancel unneeded software licenses and minimize these redundant costs.

Everything the company does is focused on two pillars—speed and multitasking—which enable clients to get more from their significant investments in G Suite. “We have made Kiwi faster, lighter and have added many additional features that simply aren’t possible when accessing G Suite applications through the browser environment.” asserts Shashoua.

Going forward the Zive team will focus on enhancing search capabilities and continue to develop features that extend the functionality of the G Suite. To make the life of CIOs better, the company has made it a point to deliver a product that is not only affordable, but also provides better security and a rich, more powerful user experience.