Brian Gowing, Business and Technology Manager for the Great Lakes District
For those district offices and churches that utilize the Google G-Suite please be aware that Google is discontinuing G-Suite and making a mandatory switchover to Google Workspace. This switchover will start by May 1, 2022, and will be completed by June 1, 2022. This affects users of G-Suite in several ways.
If you are using the free version of G-Suite (I know quite a few of my churches do), there is no free version of Google Workspace. That means you will start getting charged $6/month/user starting in June as Google switches existing G-Suite users over to Workspace. Here is additional information on what that means if you decide to keep Workspace: Google Workspace transition is happening now – Google Workspace Admin Help.
If you decide that you do not want to keep using G-Suite, you will need to cancel your account and delete your organization. There is a write-up here: Delete your organization’s Google Account – Google Workspace Admin Help.
Be very careful if you choose to delete your G-Suite accounts and delete your organization from Google. There is NO ‘undo’ button and no grace period. Once you hit the delete button all your data will cease to exist. Not only will your G-Suite data be deleted but also any Google apps or services that you used the G-Suite email accounts on. That includes YouTube channels, Google Drive documents, Google Calendar, etc. Ensure that you have backed up all of your data prior to doing this otherwise you will lose all your data and will not have any ability to recover it. Keep in mind that this is an immediate DELETE of all your Google data as soon as you confirm that you want to delete your organization from Google.
If you use YouTube for uploading videos, create a new Google account and upload all the videos to that new account prior to deleting the organization. The same applies to any other data and apps that you want to keep.
