Hey, what's going on? It's Pete Moriarty here. Great to be here
with you. What we're covering today is the latest updates in
Google Workspace and Google have this great blog, which is the
workspace updates blog. And it basically gives you a spot with
all of the updates in one place, which is really useful. However,
there's, there's just so many updates in there. And there's so
much to detail even myself, I find myself not really paying
attention to it. But certainly for our customers who are if you
are a busy business owner, running your team running your
company, you're probably not going to have heaps of time to
kind of browse through this. And so I'm going to try and distill
it down as much as possible.
Now, if you're new to the channel, my name is Pete
Moriarty, we are a small business consultancy, and we
help entrepreneurs systemize, organize and scale their
businesses using Google Workspace. And we've been
working with Workspace for over 10 years, we're a top partner in
Australia for small business. And we work with customers all
over the world. And so if you're interested in learning more
about Workspace head along to our channel, and yeah, check out
we've got plenty of videos on helping business owners with
everything business and tech and the intersection between those
But let's talk about our Workspace update. I used to have
two.
like this, this little PDF that would come out once every month
from Google. And it was like a kind of summary of what all of
the previous month's updates had been. But they do have this
handy Help page which says ways to track new releases with six
different places. So what I'm going to try to do is gone
through the the latest updates for kind of the last month or
so. And I've picked out some of the ones that I think are
highlights that I think are important to kind of know about
or notable. And I'm going to be sharing those with you. So let's
dive into it. Let's start looking at some of the actual
latest updates and what has come through.
So this is the first one we're going to cover your calendar
status will now be available inside Google Chat and Google
Chat. If you're not already using it is a pretty awesome
tool. It basically runs our company considering we have a
distributed team Google Chat is our way of keeping in touch and
keeping connected, we chose not to use third-party tools like
Slack. And I know some businesses will use things like
Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger, which I think is completely
nuts. But Google Chat basically runs our whole business. And we
use that for everything and one of the reasons why I like Google
Chat is you have all these cool integrations with the rest of
the Google world. And so what this latest update is, is that
you can see here, there's basically additional statuses
being added to Google Chat. And so inside your Google Chat,
you've got a status feature, you can choose whether you're
available, or whether you're away, or you can basically just
leave it to auto. And when you leave it on auto, it's got some
extra features here like picking up when you are in a meeting
based on your Google Calendar. So I prefer just leaving it on
auto all the time, because it means that it's just going to
automatically let people know what I'm up to. If I'm in a
meeting, that is pretty cool. But you can see here when you
set your Google Calendar for different statuses and a zoom
right in because those icons are really small, when you actually
set your statuses on your calendar, can you see that
there's this one's in focus time. And this one is out of
office. And so what that means is, it's actually going to pick
up the additional calendar statuses and actually overlay
them into your chat. Now, if you haven't used those before,
they're pretty damn groovy. And so when you are in your
calendar, let's say tomorrow, I don't I don't really have
anything on I'm out of the office. And so after my flying
lesson in the morning, I can drag a big long calendar event
there, and I can choose out of office, that would be the most
appropriate and I can just hit save. And that's basically going
to decline automatically decline, any meetings for my
team when I'm out of the office and not available for any
meetings, which is pretty cool. But the other thing there is,
let's say on a work day, maybe this afternoon, I want to put
aside some focus time for some deep work, I'm going to go ahead
and click on to focus time. And focus time is going to let me do
that. There we go. So let me save that. And I'll go ahead, I
will save the out of office tomorrow, because I am going to
be out of office probably be camping. It's good Friday going
away for the weekend. So there we go. We've got that all saved
there. So that makes it really easy for your team members to
know what's going on where you are at, particularly with remote
teams, or let's say if you're out and about on the road, and
you have team members messaging you on chat, they are going to
know exactly what you're up to, which makes things really
convenient and really easy. So great feature a big thumbs up.
Thank you, Google. Love that one. Okay, cool. So let's move
on to the next one. Now, I already covered this one in a
real this is a way to actually create emails from Google
Documents. pretty damn cool, right? And so it's using
something called I can't remember what they call it might
be smartcards. So basically, when you're in a Google
document, what you can do is you can actually create a new email
draft and use your Google document as a place to draft up
that email, collaborate with other people on the email, and
then actually send it with one click right from within the
document, which is which is pretty groovy. So let's go and
open up a new document because I want to I want to demo this one.
I haven't actually done it myself yet. I don't think so
just go to Doc dot new to open new document if you haven't done
that before. Cool. And to get started on it. We're just going
to use the app, the app button and then oh, there we go. It's
via AI Thank you very much. It's opened up email draft as a
suggested option there but otherwise you would just type
them Word email, an email draft will come up there. Here we go.
So it's opened that up for me. And so yeah, from here, we can
type who it's to. So maybe I want to type that to my CEO
Scott send that over to him, I can see see anyone I need to it
should actually pull from my address book, which is a little
bit odd that it didn't pull up, Scott, but maybe let's type in
Adrian as well. There we go, at least Adrian's in there, great.
Subject can be anything I like that, I can go ahead and write
my email message. Now anyone who is on this Google document has
the option to collaborate on this. One of my favorite
features is to use suggested edits. And so let me just move
my picture out of the way here. So on suggested edits, you can
click through and create a suggested change. So let's say
one, I've just hit the backspace button and delete that. It's not
going to delete it from the document, but it is going to
open up a comment and basically suggest that that change is
made. And then from there, people can you know, type their
own comments and other bits and pieces as they need to have a
bit of a conversation about it, which is pretty handy. But
what's wonderful about the suggested feature is that say if
you're a manager or a leader, and you have someone that you're
coaching or working with or supporting as a leader, and you
want to give some suggested improvements to what they're
doing, when you're working on a Google Doc, and you go in there
and make the changes for them, what that does is that actually
reiterates the behavior that someone brings you issues and
you solve them for them, right. Whereas suggested edits, it's
like, hey, look, you've done great work there. Here's what I
suggest you do differently, rather than you actually
overwriting the work that they've done, and rather
creating the loop that you come in and fix the problems and
updates thing. So I like this better using suggested edits, I
often use that for my team. And it also gives your team the
opportunity to really own the work, whether or not they want
to accept the edit or not, that then empowers them that it is
their choice. So I liked that one. Okay, so this little spot
here, it says, When you have finished writing the email, you
can easily convert it into a Gmail draft by clicking on this
button. Got it. Cool. All right. So we just click that button
preview in Gmail, it's creating the draft, and it's popping up
here in the lower right hand corner, there we go, it's ready
to go. And I can literally just go ahead and click the Send
button right from here, which I'm not going to go and do,
because my team will be very confused. does happen from time
to time I jump on a live stream and do crazy stuff. And then so
that's covered Gmail, that's a really cool feature. I love that
our next one is moving over to Google meat. And Google might
have actually added in some new management settings for
administrators. So let's have a look at what we've got here. So
basically, these are a set of policies for Google meet. And so
when those team members are participating in meetings, you
can basically switch on and off some of their features like chat
on and off whether or not they can present whether or not they
can participate in q&a. Now, if you're a small business owner,
this is probably not that interesting or useful to you,
because you're less than 20 people in your company, you
know, why would you want to switch anything off for anyone.
But if you've got more than 20 employees, maybe you've got 50
100, couple 100, you're in that more kind of mid market or
enterprise space? Well, you're more likely to have different
groups of users. And those different user profiles would
very likely have different use cases for workspace within your
organization. So for example, maybe you have like a town hall
style meeting, and you want to have couple of 100 people
joining that meeting. But you don't want anyone to be able to
hit the Present button and accidentally interrupt the
presentation by overriding and presenting, let's say, for
example, maybe you've got a manufacturing business, and
you've got like a whole bunch of floor staff, who really just
need to kind of like tap into the meeting and ask questions,
but not necessarily have like random chitchat filling up the
chat. And these are the kinds of policies that you could use to
restrict something like that. And so in the admin panel, you
can see on the left hand side here, you can set this up based
on the organizational unit, or are you in it speak and
actually, you know, configure what groups of staff you would
like to have this setup. Now, like everything we do, we
recommend that you kind of know and understand the high level
feature and understand what this may be used for as a use case.
But we don't necessarily recommend that if you're a
business owner yourself that you're getting in and fiddling
with these kinds of settings yourself, this is more
appropriate for our team to do a concierge team or someone who is
your dedicated IT professional who's helping you out with your
workspace account.
So if you're interested in that, you can of course, reach out to
our team. And we'd be very happy to help you review all of your
policies right across your business or across your
workspace account. And they can cover things like desktop
computers, and what happens on Google Chrome. They can cover if
you've got any Chrome devices like a Chromebook or Chromebox.
I'm currently operating from my Chrome box. And they of course,
cover any mobile devices and any settings within the core, Google
workspace apps themselves. So great, great options there for
updating Google meet, good to see Googler you know, bit by
bit, they kind of release something and then typically,
enterprise and corporate customers will ask Google to
implement more features around policy around management. And
then bit by bit Google does implement those which is really
good.