Google Chrome Enterprise Reviews

When it comes to discussing Google Chrome Enterprise, it stands out as the optimal solution for managing work sessions and systems, particularly in scenarios where manpower is limited. This solution is especially beneficial for organizations that require support but have a scarcity of administrators. To illustrate, let's consider an example involving an e-commerce platform, such as Amazon. Operating an e-commerce business involves aspects like warehouses and delivery hubs. In situations where you aim to avoid extensive manpower for system management, Google Chrome Enterprise comes into play. By acquiring Chromebooks or transforming existing machines into Google Chrome OS, costs can be minimized. The platform operates with centralized policies, encompassing both user-based and device-based policies. 

Chrome functions as a comprehensive solution due to its continuous self-evaluation and improvement. The evolution process has been significant, with a notable distance covered from its inception to the present. Notably, features like VPN support have been incorporated over time, enhancing the platform's capabilities. A distinctive feature is that users don't even need to know the Wi-Fi password; upon signing into the machine, internet connectivity is established immediately. Furthermore, the cloud storage system ensures data isn't stored locally, making it seamless for users to switch between machines. In summary, Google Chrome Enterprise is an excellent solution, particularly when there's a shortage of available manpower.

Identifying areas for improvement can be challenging since Chrome consistently strives to enhance itself. One aspect I'd like to highlight is virtualization. For instance, if you require desktop-based applications like Cisco or Adobe products on your local machine, Chrome's support is limited. While they offer Linux solutions for virtualization, my query or request would be to expand this to include Windows-based applications. If this were implemented, it would be a valuable enhancement, encouraging broader adoption by companies.

Chrome is remarkably stable owing to its affiliation with Google. I haven't observed any instances of Google facing downtime in the past three to four years. This makes Chrome an exceptionally stable and dependable solution.

In terms of scalability, Google Chrome Enterprise demonstrates versatility. It can operate efficiently even on a one-gigabyte RAM machine, which includes outdated devices. This means that even if you have an older machine, you can still run Google Chrome Enterprise on it. Thus, scalability isn't a concern for Google Chrome Enterprise. It works seamlessly on both older machines and the latest ones.

We've utilized technical support several times. With Google, having technical support is immensely valuable. When you submit technical queries to them, they promptly respond within a few minutes, ensuring a swift resolution. Even for their own downtime or issues, if you're facing any particular or general concerns, Google support ensures responses within a maximum of one hour. The attention and quality of technical support from Google are truly exceptional.

Certainly, the process is neither entirely straightforward nor overly intricate. It presents complexities but not to the extent that it becomes overly difficult. The implementation involves steps such as configuration and user education. For example, if you're transitioning from Macbooks to Chromebooks, users need guidance on Chromebook operation. This might entail understanding where to navigate and how to make selections. While some individuals might easily adapt, others might require assistance. In essence, the process falls in between being simple and highly complex. Its duration depends on proper execution.

In our case, it turned out to be a year-long project due to the scope of implementing it across twenty thousand users in various regions. This extensive user base extended the deployment timeline. Additionally, there was the need to replace our existing hardware devices. This complexity resulted in a longer duration for us. However, under normal circumstances, the process is straightforward.

The setup involves having the operating system hosted on your premises, while the management system is a cloud-based solution. This creates a combination of on-site and web-based implementations. It's a hybrid solution that encompasses both client-side and website implementation aspects.

It's essential to possess certain Google Chrome credentials and certificates for implementation. If you're looking to carry out these tasks, your engineers may need to acquire the Chrome Enterprise Administrator certification. This certification becomes necessary as they need to have a comprehensive understanding of how Google Chrome functions and how improvements can be made. In this role, technical personnel are responsible for managing and optimizing the system.

The advantage is clear, as adopting Google Chrome Enterprise solutions leads to a favorable return on investment. Notably, you'll spend less on infrastructure and hardware acquisition costs. Even if you choose not to invest in new laptops, the solution can be deployed on your existing machines, even those at the end of their lifecycle. This remains possible due to Chrome's compatibility. For instance, we have around three thousand devices that would otherwise be unused due to being at their end-of-cycle stage. Even if the manufacturer, such as Dell, no longer provides support for those laptops, they can still function as Chromebooks. By installing the Chrome OS, these devices regain usability, functioning similarly to new machines

Pricing varies significantly based on different regions and specific requirements. The cost can differ for the Euro price as opposed to the Asia-specific price. Generally, the standard pricing falls within the range of twenty-five to thirty dollars per license. This payment can be structured on a monthly or yearly basis. Opting for the yearly payment plan often comes with an added discount, either directly from Google or through negotiations with your vendor.

We did not evaluate any other solutions. Organisations commonly utilize both Mac and Windows machines as their fundamental operating systems. As of 2020, Chrome Enterprise emerged as a novel solution. We undertook exploration and subsequent implementation of Chrome Enterprise.

The adoption of Google Chrome tends to rise in specific sectors such as healthcare or e-commerce. These industries find it relatively effortless to transition to Google Chrome due to its user-friendly learning curve and straightforward implementation. This choice not only leads to cost savings in terms of infrastructure but also alleviates the workload for administrators and IT staff in comparison to alternative solutions.

I would overall rate it nine or ten.

Our primary use case for the solution for testing our web applications.

Google Chrome Enterprise has helped synchronize everything related to internet web browsing across all our devices. For example, if a person is browsing on one device and wants to pick up on another device, they can easily access it.

The Google History tab is valuable because it is very easy to navigate through history and look at open tabs on different devices. Additionally, its integration with Google Search is very good, and bookmarking is very good because they are synchronized across all devices.

The Google browser extensions are generally useful, but the solution can be improved by including additional extensions that can be adapted to support different browsing behaviours. For example, it could be more proactive in recommending extensions. Additional data security and data privacy features could be proactively recommended by Google to show users that their data is being used responsibly.

We have been using the solution for many years, and we are currently using the latest version.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. The solution is good but can improve by including additional extensions that can be adapted to support different browsing behaviours. I advise users adopting the solution to set it up across all their different devices to leverage it in the best way possible and continuously update their browsers.

I use the solution for browsing.

The most valuable aspect of the product is that I do not have to take any courses or lessons to use it.

The performance could be faster. Support for Google Maps could be improved.

I have been using the solution for about eight years. I am using the latest version of the solution.

The stability is fine. I rate the tool’s stability a nine out of ten.

The tool’s scalability is quite good. Everybody in our company uses the solution. We have ten users. We plan to add one or two people to our team in the next six to seven months.

The support is knowledgeable. The team has helped me in some cases. The standard service is fine.

I have used Opera. I switched to Google Chrome Enterprise because my company chose to use it.

The initial setup is straightforward. It took 10 minutes to deploy the product. I am not from an IT background, yet the deployment process was very easy for me. The solution is cloud-based.

I can do the deployment myself. We have two engineers to maintain the product.

I would recommend the tool to others. If we need something to be renewed or get a notification that our access is about to expire, we notify our manager. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for email and other office tasks. It's used for internal user communication and various business operations. 

We like that we use so many of the tools every day for our business.

The initial setup was pretty simple. 

It's a scalable product.

The solution has been stable. 

It's free to use. They don't charge educational or non-profit institutions. 

Technical support is great.

They need to deal with their memory management. Google Chrome is very RAM hungry. It takes up a lot of RAM resources. 

The solution is stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

We're not a very big company. We're pretty small. That said, I've found the solution to be able to scale well. It's not a problem to extend it. 

Technical support has been very good. They are helpful and responsive. We have no issues with support.

The solution is very simple to implement. There's no complexity in the setup process. I found it to be very easy.

We're an educational non-profit. We don't have to pay money to use the solution. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. I love Google. It's a great product.

We use the product to run applications and devices.  

The product's stability can be better. 

I have been working with the product for eight years. 

I would rate the product's stability a seven out of ten. 

I would rate the product's scalability a seven out of ten. We have 300 users for the product. 

The solution's technical support is good. 

The product's setup is easy. The tool's deployment took one month to complete. 

We did the solution's deployment in-house. 

I would rate the product an eight out of ten. 

Whenever we want to test one of our products, we are using this solution. When we have a new feature or changes, we test it on the browser. It comes with many extensions and we use it on a daily basis to do all our tests.

This solution is user-friendly with security features detecting if there is suspicious activity on the browser. There is a lot of extensions we can use to provide us with good coverage.

Your account can be shared with multiple devices to allow you access to all of your saved data, this is useful if you move from one device to another.

The performance could improve because it uses many computer resources. If you are low on resources, such as RAM, it can cause some slowness in the computer. However, this does not happen all the time and I think if you have the proper allocated amount of RAM it would work smoothly.

In an upcoming release, the enhanced troubleshooting feature needs to improve to be able to identify the issues for the use case and for the user experience.

I have been using this solution for approximately one year.

If we want to expand how many users are using the solution it scales to our needs. If you want a larger team there would be no problems scaling up.

We currently have approximately 200 users using this solution.

There is a vast amount of documentation and help material online from Google to support our needs.

The installation is straightforward.

We are on a monthly subscription for this solution.

I would highly recommend this solution for any enterprise that is looking to use this tool for their workspace. Google is a well-known enterprise and this solution includes many features which are scalable for remote work.

I rate Google Chrome Enterprise a seven out of ten.

The idea is that if you look at an exam room now in a departmental clinic, in a hospital, you'll typically find that nurses and techs are going room to room with a laptop and they're not running a wired workstation. It's easier to run Chromebook. That's just now catching on. Quite a few institutions are starting to move this way and the reasoning is that if you're talking about lightweight cloud applications, for the most part, it runs very well. If they're running Epic EHR in the cloud or Cerner or whatever, it's much easier to run it on something like a Chrome OS-type situation where it's secure. You don't have anything on that device essentially.

I'm doing a big push towards healthcare using Chromebooks due to the fact that it is so easy to manage the GCP, sort of the admin console, for deploying VDI and in some cases with Parallels, if it has to have high-end Windows applications running on it.

You can put together fairly cheap laptops or tablets that can be in the hands of the nursing staff and run pretty efficiently.

I really like the fact that Chrome OS is super secure, easy to manage, and so forth. 

It's portable and inexpensive. 

Chrome Enterprise is really easy to deploy and manage.

One of the beauties of something like Chrome OS is that, on the data lake side and on the cloud side, everything is web-based. You're looking at web APIs. It makes it easy to get to any dashboards or any systems without having to have any specialized software. A plus for a Chrome OS is the cloud-type operating system.

You still need to have a pretty good understanding of GCP to deploy it properly. Their enterprise system is not just an easy thing where you can run it from the admin console. You're still running it as a GCP software as a service.

They do make Chromeboxes - small form factor computers - which have a little more horsepower. The question I have on this and going forward at using Chrome OS in the healthcare side if you're looking at these workstations that are doing high-powered rendering and volumetric rendering, and take a lot of horsepower in the GPU side if they'll be able to handle that.

They haven't really addressed that. That's a little bit trickier. You could run Chrome OS and you could do Chrome RDP to a virtual machine running with a lot of horsepower in the cloud as your rendering engine. You could do that, however, the tricky part about that is that a lot of times over the years we'd use Teradici or we'd use PC over IP for these high intensive graphic stations. That's still a kind of disconnect for me on the Chrome OS side. I have a mix in some hospitals where they'll say, yeah, we want Chrome OS for all the nursing computers, however, all the radiology computers have to be OnPrem Z series, Hewlett Packard works stations, or whatever. It's just not across the board perfect for every department's needs yet.

When you get to the CTL-qualified laptops for Chrome OS running Parallels and running Windows applications on it, those become higher-end machines. That's okay - there's a handful of users that need to use real Windows applications, however, typically, that's not the case. I'm sort of trying to work through that right now. 

I haven't used the solution for that long. I'm in the early stages. 

The stability is very good.

The scalability is great.

My prediction is four years from now you'll see a Windows and a Mac OS that are completely cloud. They'll be cloud-based. Everybody's going to have to go down that road because the problem with, even with zero trust and a really solid perimeter for healthcare in general, or for FinTech, or for financials is banking, it's really hard to manage ransomware at this point. The more open-ended stuff you've got the more problems. The tax surface is a problem. We all know multi-cloud environments can be great, however, you've got to be on top of your management of them from the IM side and the security cybersecurity standpoint. 

Therefore, when you're talking about something like this, where you're alleviating a lot of that risk, that's what's going to propel this forward. Google is the first to really kind of embrace it. That said, you're going to see everybody else follow suit. It makes sense. Why do you want to put all your horsepower in the device? You're running it off a virtual machine or a container in the cloud somewhere.

I have not been involved with technical support. I'm sort of in the early stages of that, with GCP and with Google Chrome. I'm just really excited about it due to their track record. From a cybersecurity, maintenance, and support standpoint I hear they have been really good. I've just really gone on the journey here to start. I put that forward as my solution. I'm doing a couple of new hospitals right now and I'm just at the beginning.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward and it is easy to deploy.

The pricing of the solution is very good. it's relatively inexpensive as compared to different setups you could do.

I'd advise those considering the solution that part of the process is training some staff to have a good foundation in GCP to understand what they're getting involved in as it's easy to say you're running it off the admin console and it's a pretty easy point and click, fill in the box, whatever you want to, however, you really need to understand the spend and the concept to the GCP console. That's kind of like AWS saying, hey man, here's our health lake, our data lake, and all you got to do is put whatever instances you want in there and whatever connectors you want and APIs, and we'll take care of it. Well, if you don't really understand AWS suspend and workflow, you can get yourself in trouble quickly.

You could have too much on the EBS side or too much on the block storage side. It's the same thing when you're looking at Chrome OS. One of the important aspects of it on the Enterprise is to also look at GCPs management and how all this is taking place, as some of those applications that you're going to be running aren't all necessarily in the Google store. 

If you're going to host an EMR like Cerner, Allscripts, Meditech, Epic, or whatever it is in the cloud, then that's going to be a different approach on how you access that from your Chrome OS. Therefore, my recommendation is if you're going to go that way, make sure your IT staff has an understanding of GCPs processes and how that all works from a fundamental standpoint.

I'd rate the product at a seven out of ten from what I've seen so far. 

As far as I'm concerned, I have to be neutral. I don't really make any pretense subjectivity. Honestly, I'm an IT guy. I'm also a medical guy, and I'm also an AB guy and a network guy in general. I cover a lot of bases and a lot of times what I'm looking for is a distributed system that can handle a lot of high-end workstation virtual desktops. We're running Nvidia CUDAs and whatever we had to run in the background to be used for rendering, Multislice CTs, et cetera.

It's got some pitfalls. You understand that when you're not running full-blown applications. You're still at a disadvantage for certain things. Also, certain specialty groups and departments may have to bring in software that is a standalone type approach. You have got to figure out, can you access that from a browser, a secure browser or not? There are some disconnects as to who's in the flock or not.

Whereas, if you're running in a total Windows environment and you're running Windows Server 2022 or 2019, and you're running whatever you want as Hyper-V sessions, that's easier to do. There's a trade-off when you look at what the capabilities are.