Back in June, with the announcement that Workspace is available “for everyone,” Google revealed that “Rooms” in Chat would soon be renamed to “Spaces” and gain a slew of new features. That rebrand is now underway.
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While text chatting with classic Hangouts is still possible today, Google has killed most of the legacy service’s video calling features. Google will soon restore a familiar capability that lets you make direct calls using Meet without having to generate a link ahead of time.
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Google wants to build tools for the future of (hybrid) work with Workspace. To that end, Google Workspace is acquiring the team behind Playspace.
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Google continues to add more features to Chat as it becomes available for more and more people ahead of the classic Hangouts depreciation. The Google Chat web app is now integrating Tenor GIF search.
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To help employees better manage their day, Google Calendar is introducing new “Time Insights” that let paid Workspace users see “how [their] time is spent across meetings and collaborators.”
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Google Tasks is a straightforward organization tool that’s tightly integrated with Gmail, Calendar, and other Workspace apps. A small redesign of Google Tasks for Android and iOS introduces tabs that let you quickly jump between lists.
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The process of shutting down classic Hangouts for Workspace users is almost complete, as Google this week enables the integrated Gmail with Chat and Rooms for even more paid accounts.
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Last year, Google Chat added support for talking with users outside their company, thus expanding from being just an internal team communication tool. Google Workspace admins are now getting the ability to limit that external Chat access.
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Google Calendar already lets you specify your working hours and earlier this year added support for split schedules. Google is now letting users share day-to-day locations in Calendar amid the increase of hybrid work environments.
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With Chat serving as a key part of the integrated Gmail experience, Google lets users quickly specify their activity status. In addition to the existing availability options, you’re now able to set a custom status in Gmail and Chat on the web.
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Google is rolling out a handful of new features for Meet that focus on improving safety and security. Namely, the ability to have co-hosts in Meet calls is coming to more Google Workspace users.
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Last month, Google announced a revamp of all its emoji — nearly 1,000 characters — coming to Android 12 this fall and Chrome OS 92. These new emoji designs are also set to arrive in Google Chat over the coming weeks.
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Google today announced a “Security update” for Drive to “make file sharing more secure.” This is part of a broader company-wide change that also affects YouTube and will impact the productivity app on September 13, 2021.
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Google Chat conversations let you quickly schedule a Calendar event, add a file from Drive, or start a Meet call. The secondary file and image-sharing options in Google Chat can now be disabled by Workspace admins.
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To increase its enterprise standing and encourage adoption, Google Cloud today announced “Google Enterprise APIs” that will be governed by a stricter policy in regards to when the company changes or deprecates them.
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Back in March, Google made Assistant generally available for all enterprise accounts on Android. Workspace users will soon be able to use Google Assistant on the Nest Hub Max and other dedicated devices.
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As of last month, all personal Google Accounts can enable the new Gmail that supports Chat and Rooms. The latter aspect, which will soon be renamed to “Spaces,” allows for large-scale productivity. Gmail now supports opening a Google Slides presentation directly to allow for multitasking with Chat.
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Downtime among Google’s largest services is typically rare, but it does occur from time to time. Google is now updating the Workspace Status Dashboard and other tools that admins can use to keep track of outages.
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Google has a multi-stage plan to shut down classic Hangouts and move enterprise Workspace customers to Chat. This latest step in advancing Google Chat adoption takes place next month.
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Back in October, Google announced that Meet video calling would be available on Glass Enterprise Edition 2. Following a closed beta that required sign-up, Meet on Glass is now available for any Google Workspace customer/account.
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In addition to video backgrounds on the web, Google is rolling out the ability to change your background in Meet for Android today. This feature is initially limited to pre-selected defaults and first came to desktops last October.
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Announced last month alongside Workspace becoming available “for everyone” (i.e., free personal accounts), Google said today that its “Individual” tier is now available in five countries for those with a small business or other “passion project.”
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At the start of this year, Google announced that it was revamping its desktop client strategy for Drive. The new “Google Drive for desktop” that replaces “Backup and Sync” by adding automatic Google Photos upload is now appearing for some users.
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In the transition to Meet, Google got rid of “Hangouts on Air,” or the ability to livestream video calls directly to YouTube for anybody to view. That feature is coming back, starting for education customers this year, but until then, Google is extending who can see internal Meet livestreams.
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