Hi there. this is Gordon from Cobry, we are Official Google cloud partners
and we specialise in helping organizations make the most of G Suite
and so this is our latest episode of the work from home series where we're going
to be looking at some tips and tricks on the different apps throughout G Suite to
help you work more efficiently while at home.
Today, I'm going to be focusing on
Google Chat which is going to tie in with some of the other tools
like Google Meet so you can stay in touch with your colleagues, collaborate
and be a lot more efficient while working at home during the lockdown so
let's dive in and we'll see what we can do. So I'm going to start here just on
the new tab page for Google Chrome - which we always recommend that you use when
you're using G Suite, I mean, that's the browser that was built for intended use
for G Suite; all the apps are optimized to be used with Google Chrome and it's
incredibly secure, so we'd always recommend using Chrome when using G
Suite. You might know it just across the top here I've got my kind of
frequently used apps pinned across the top so that's I've easy access they're
always there and they don't take a huge amount of space up across the
top of my Chrome browser. To get into Google Chat, we're gonna have a
look over here to the app launcher in the top right, come down, select 'chat' from the
drop-down and let it load up. If you are interested in using some pin tabs to save
a bit of screen space all you need to do is right-click on the tab, come down
to pin and it's gonna squash it down so it's nice and neat there and you can keep
your commonly used ones up there for easy access. Google Chat is an
internal messaging service for within G Suite - it's all included and it's instant
messaging with your own colleagues so it's internal at the moment and it
lets you get quick answers to questions you might have
whether that's direct to one person like an example here: my colleague, Rowan.
Or whether it's to a team of people where you might want to make use
of the room features that you have in chat. Basically, for this we can create
specific rooms for different use cases you might want to do that on a
department by department basis so you'd have one for HR; one for sales; maybe one
for finance or the alternative could be, you'd do it per office so if
you've got a few offices scattered around the country, you'd go for one for Glasgow,
the remote team; maybe then a team in London as well; or Blackpool and you
can set these up so that everybody that's in there will get updated with
any conversation or any kind of new updates that they need to follow along
with, projects they can easily keep track there. Let's have a quick look
at some of the other features here if we look down just below the rooms, you can
see here that there's an option here for bots. Bots are a really nice little kind of
a add-on for chat which you can use and you can automate things and use a little bit of
artificial intelligence to try and make things a little bit slicker. The first
one that we would recommend that you'd always use here is Google Drive.
Basically, this is gonna pull all of the notifications that you get from Google
Drive rather than having them in individual emails in your inbox we're
gonna have it come into one single thread within Google Chat so that's a
really nice handy feature there and maybe let you guys explore the bots that
are available - you can do so just by clicking on the plus there, having a
scroll through some popular ones or you can do as search for something
a bit more specific. Okay, so we've come back from the the bot
sections just now, and we'll take another look at the instant messaging - the
live chat with our colleagues so the first part I'm going to do is just show
you how easy it is to start chatting: so this is my colleague, Rowan,
I'm just going to say:"Hi Rowan, how are you?" and we'll see if he's online at the
moment. What I'm going to do here is click on the little Drive icon and we're
gonna pull up a project proposal that we've been working that I want to get a
little bit of help with. All we need to do is click there, you can see
now that the link appears but I've send a link and he'll be able to click that
open and and kind of review it whenever he has time; may not be right
away but if so that'd be great. What we can do next is we can actually
just send her a meeting link which you can click and just jump straight in so
why don't we have chat through it. And all I need to do now is click the little
icon here for the meet and that's going to pull up a link and all I need to do now
is hit enter and it's going to pop up here.
Rowan is just gonna click this same link that he sees on the other side - I can just
click 'Join now'. Well there he is. Hello, sir how are you?
I'm very well thanks, how are you?
Good good, yep not bad at all.
Just doing a little overview of how to use Google Meet through Google Chat.
And how all the apps come together. Thank you for sparing a couple of
minutes of your day; you're going to be doing a little bit of a recording
for us for Google meet in a bit more detail right? Sure am, I'm gonna go
through all the tools of one of what I think is the best G Suite apps out there
so yeah, very much looking forward to telling the people abouth that.
Excellent, okay well look forward to seeing it and thanks for joining me today
catch you later on. Alrighty, see ya.
So there we go that's the
chat finished we can either click this to return to home screen but if we want to
just close it off we can just quit the app there. The one difference between
chatting with in rooms and chatting direct with somebody in a
direct message is that you can use threads within rooms which means you can
have multiple topics going on in the same room without things getting
confused and getting kind of lost in between. So all I'm going to do here is
click new thread and say: "This is a conversation about fruit." and then if we
wanted to carry on that conversation about fruit then we could go in here:
"bananas", but if we wanted to then have a conversation about veg, maybe? "This is
a conversation.", and you know we could start talking about broccoli in here if
we wanted to - if that was what was, kind of top of your list of priorities then you
could. And then always the most recently used thread is going to come to the
bottom and so it's nice and easy to stay up-to-date with everything and if
you wanted to tag people in these chats you can do @all and then that's going to tag
everybody in the room or you can type individual people such as my colleague
Rowan, and if I hit the enter there then he's going to get a little notification
that he needs to come through and make sure he reads it and actions anything
that's being asked. So that is a quick overview of Google Chat and a little
taster on Google Meet so I hope that's been helpful for you and if you'd like
to find out anything more then get in touch with us or just stay tuned for the
next episode so hopefully you can pick up a few other
tricks. Thanks a lot, see you later