Pete Moriarty here, great to have you we are
doing another Google workspace updates. This is our place on
the channel where we go through all the latest updates to Google
workspace give you a little bit of a rundown of what's new in
the Google world. So
if you're new to the channel, my name is Pete Moriarty. And we
help organizations and businesses systemize, organize
and scale using Google workspace and other technology tools,
tools as well. We're really passionate about finding that
middle ground between technology and strategy and business and
bringing those all together to build more successful
businesses. Now, with specifically Google workspace,
we really love implementing that into businesses, because it's a
very scalable ecosystem. And anyone who's already using
Google workspace knows that it's really easy to use. But there's
also a lot of features as well. And you may not get around to
everything that Google releases in the feature updates, I've
already highlighted, I think in front of me about eight or nine
different features just in the last month that have been
released. And these are my top picks out of everything that
Google's updated in the last month. And now Google publishes
a update to their blog, every time there's an update in the
Google workspace world, but they can go a little bit overboard
with all the intricate updates in there. And unless you're a
full time IT admin, you probably wouldn't bother reading every
single one. So I'm going to summarize my favorite ones over
the last month and share those with you. So the first one we're
going to jump into is inside Google Spaces, which is
basically our chat rooms, you can now actually have the space
Manager, which is the person with the little green person
with a little green triangle next to their name, that's the
space manager, that person actually now has permission to
delete any messages that are inside the space, which is
pretty useful. So I've got a space here with my team, let's
go and open it up. And so inside any spaces here, you can see
someone will sometimes have a little green icon there on their
name. And if I go and open up, gotta be careful, I don't share
anything here, you can see that the space manager is the person
with the little green thing next to them. And basically that
space manager is the person who has the ability to add and
remove people from the space. But they can also now delete
chat messages, which is pretty cool. So if you've got like a
big group chat, and you've got like your whole team in there,
and someone says something stupid or inappropriate, that
might be a reason why you might want to use that. Yeah, but
very, very cool feature Google's now giving a few more admin
controls, what I'm glad to see is that Google obviously have a
team still working on chat, you know, in the past that kind of
like learn something, and then not really bother updating it or
doing anything else with it. And what this is showing is that
Google is actually committed to continuing to develop the
product, which is really good, it's really good to see, you
know, we don't want any products kind of disappearing and going
and going by the wayside. Okay, so next up is an update to
companion mode. And so you can now share your video feed when
you're in companion mode. Now, I'm not sure why you would want
to do this, if you're not, if you're not familiar with
companion mode. Companion mode is a very cool feature, what it
actually lets you do is join a meeting from your laptop, but
effectively doesn't bring your microphone and doesn't bring
your camera in. And what that's really useful for is let's say
you've got like a meeting room set up or you've got a maybe
you're using an iPad or a secondary device to join a
meeting, you want to have another device ready for you to
either make notes on or share a presentation. And I use this all
the time, sometimes I travel in a camper truck, and I'll do my
meetings like on my iPhone or on an iPad sitting in a tripod, and
then I'll use companion mode to join the meeting. And when I
join the meeting, it will give me a little option there to use
companion mode. And effectively it lets you join without camera
or microphone. And you can share, you can participate and
chat to participate in polls and all the other features that are
in there, which is really cool. You can see all the
participants, you can highlight different disciplines. But you
know, it doesn't share anything. What that solves is the problem
of having feedback coming through if you were to join a
meeting twice. Now the solution to that I used to do when I
joined from a second device is just mute myself switch off my
camera, and then I'd turn off the volume on my computer and it
would work fine. But Google's made like the dummies version of
joining from a second device. And that's called companion
mode. Now, what's changed here is Google have basically said
okay, well if you want to bring your camera in, but obviously
not audio, you can now bring your camera and camera into
companion mode. I can't think of a scenario where I would want to
do that because I'm usually already on another screen either
with a Google meat hardware device or I've got you know,
like another screen with natural camera there. But for whatever
reason, you can now do that. So lucky, you can now bring your
camera in. Cool. All right, let's let's move on to the next
one. So Google Now let you bring in Table templates and drop down
chips into Google Docs. This is a pretty interesting feature.
I'm really interested to see where Google are going with
this. What they're now basically letting you do is build out more
and more and more options inside your Google Docs with dynamic
content. So you can see here you've got dropdowns. And what
that reminds me of is something like monday.com or Asana.
They're effectively starting to give you more dynamic data
living right inside your Google Documents. Now why would you
want to have that in a Google Doc? Why would you not just use
Trello or Asana or Monday or something else for it? I don't
know. But for some people who like to do too asks inside
documents, I think it's nuts. But for some people who do like
to do tasks inside documents, you may choose to use this
feature. I don't know, let me know in the comments if you
think this is going to be useful or not definitely big moves that
Google is making in the documents. And I covered last
time, the email drafting, I think that one's pretty useful.
I can't see a use case for this just yet. If you do happen to be
using other task based management tools, but yeah, but
let me know either way, maybe, maybe there is something there.
That's useful. All right. Next up, what do we got next? Okay,
so this is a admin console policy. And this one's related
to storage. So what this allows you to do now, if you go into
the storage menu in your workspace admin, you can
actually see who's using what storage you can also choose, you
know, there's different storage settings. And there's some
policies around that. But one of the most useful things is
Google's made it really, really easy to see who is using what so
you can see here, you've got your top users who may be using
storage in their individual accounts. And then you've got
your shared drives that are using the storage as well. Now,
up until recently, this just didn't matter at all, you pretty
much had unlimited storage, if you're a business, you'd
definitely be on one of the business plans. And then you'd
effectively have unlimited storage for your Google account.
But Google has now changed, and your storage counts per user. So
you get one terabyte per user, if you're on a business account,
or above on Google workspace, and that's going to start
counting. So you need to now be mindful. And start to think
about who's using what inside your business and be careful
that the space doesn't fill up. So thank you Google, big thumbs
up nice, easy report to see, were nice, easy to report to see
where everything is used it. Okay, next up, we have an update
to hardware kits, Zeus have sent out an updated kit for Google
meat, you can see there's a few different options here. These
come with the speaker mic, which are really, really great. Those
big mines basically let you get everyone in a small meeting room
or in a boardroom, you can even link up multiple together, which
is really cool. And these are just phenomenal, phenomenal
devices, any Google meet hardware, there's a few
different ways of getting access to Google meet hardware. But
these are just absolutely phenomenal devices, they turn
any meeting room into a powerhouse. And I love these, I
even have one of these set up at home. So I can just click one
button and jump straight into meetings. And I used to have it
just sitting in front of the couch. So I could sit on the
couch with a laptop and have my have my Google meet there where
I could jump straight in. Now if you have any kind of hybrid
office type setup, where you have an actual office setup, or
you have a dedicated office with dedicated boardrooms, you've got
to jump onto Google meet hardware kits, they're
excellent. If you're interested, we are a reseller, so you can
reach out to our team and help out with pricing and supply.
Okay, next up, we have some updates to Google Sheets. And
here, we actually have context aware corrections inside Google
Sheets. And so context aware suggestions, you can see there,
it's suggesting a new formula, they're actually going to look
not just at the immediate cell, but also around the context of
your document as well. And if you've ever gone to try and
create a formula and got a suggested formula from Google,
and with one of those, you know, suggested formulas, just have it
not working, you've had to go in and you know, fix and kind of
clean things up manually. This makes your life very, very easy,
it makes it much easier than trying to do it. So Google is
starting to bring their AI into everywhere that we are working.
And I've said many times, you know, inside of Google Sheets,
we have the insights tab. And on that insights tab, you can click
a button and it's using AI to automatically you know, create
graphs and to just pivot tables and all those kinds of things
for you. We are not far away from the moment that Google
decides to enable voice for their spreadsheets. Now what
will happen at that point very likely, is that we'll just
literally be able to talk to our spreadsheet, ask it data and
have that information coming straight back to us. And that's
just like, you know, something like Minority Report where we're
literally working with the computer, and you know, the
computer is doing absolutely everything for us. So very,
very, very cool stuff coming up there. next update is Google
Sites is getting the ability to have company wide themes. And
you can actually import themes from a company library. Now our
organization is not big enough, even though we've got 5060
people, we're not quite big enough that we're creating sites
every day of the week. But if you are in a larger
organization, you might be the kind of business where you're
encouraging team members to create intranet. And this would
be a pretty useful feature for you. So you can make sure that
the branding stays based on your company branding. So you can
create a theme and submitted a resume to some kind of theme
library. And then from there, you can effectively publish that
to the team. And they'll be able to import and work with that
theme. Anytime they're launching a new site, great one, Google
that's going to be really useful, particularly for large
organizations that want to keep everything consistent. Okay,
next one is a search feature. And this is inside Google Drive,
probably not useful unless you're doing a lot of meetings.
But you can now run a search parameter and search for Google
meat content inside of Google Drive. And so if you're
interested in doing that, what it will allow you to do is
search for all of these different bits of information,
meeting recordings, chat transcripts, basically all of
that is going to be available inside your Google Drive. And if
you search their app, and then Google meet it, that's the
operator. It's going to bring up everything. Now. What you may
find this useful for is if you had a previous meeting, and you
say hey, you know what? Oh, that I'm sure that was said in that
meeting somewhere, or I'm sure somebody mentioned that. The
great thing about this is anytime you have like a calendar
event and you attach something, it's going to show up in the
meeting and become a meeting document and Google search will
actually even go into it will go inside PDFs inside your Google
Drive. So the search is very, very intelligent goes quite
deep, as well. And so this would be an opportunity. I think, if
you've had a meeting, you're not quite sure exactly what was said
in the meeting, but you want to go and find the documents and
the resources related to it, you can go ahead and open that. And
you can see you don't have to be the owner of those files that
will also search other people's files as well. So finally, we've
got updates to Google Calendar, in sharing your work location. I
really, really love this feature, because well, you know
what we're all working remotely. Now we may as well have all of
our team members knowing where we're up to, if we're in the
office, if we're out of the office, if we're on holidays, if
we're working from the road, if we're working from our mobile
phone in a park, we want to have our team know where we're at. So
we can actually work together efficiently. So Google allows
you to set your work location right in such a calendar, which
makes it nice and simple for you to keep your team updated on
where things are at. So if I go ahead to my calendar here can
see I've actually automatically already sorry, updated mine to
track because we're not today in the track, actually, it's going
to be from next week forward, I work in the truck. But let's say
for example, if on Fridays, you're working from home, you
can select Home there, and you can choose if it's just one
Friday, or all Fridays. So I'm going to actually going to
change, change my truck here to home today, this Thursday. There
we go. And you can see it's automatically in home, but it
should keep my next week, there we go still in the truck. I
gotta be on holidays and broadcasting from the road. And
so you can see it's automatically put that there in
the right place. If you're not yet registered for our workspace
bootcamp, please make sure you head to our website and check
that out, there will be a link down below this video as well.
So you can go straight there, that is where you can get access
to you and your team, the basic knowledge, but also the genius
steps in making sure you've got everything you need to know
about the Google workspace ecosystem sorted for you and
your business. Now we want to help everyone in the Google
workspace world get to superstar level. But as you know,
sometimes there are many options and buttons and settings. You
don't quite know what all the best ones are for your business.
Well, we're going to take you through all the basics of mail,
calendar, drive, chat, meet admin panel, saving a password,
and we're going to take you through everything that we wish
every one of our customers has done right? There's many
customers that work with us, and they buy concierge and we
consulted their businesses and do a big health check and go
deep with them. But many, many more customers who maybe just
have their billing with us. Or if you are subscribed to our
YouTube channel, and you're not yet doing business with us, or
the bootcamp is a great way to start and a great way to make
sure that you and your team have everything that you need to know
with Google workspace. So click on the link below, check out
that bootcamp, it's going to be great, it's coming up within the
next month. So make sure you jump on to grab a ticket to
those they are limited, but we've made them a very
affordable price. And you can bring two staff members along as
well. What I would recommend is you and your team have one or
two people in there who are delegated as your Google experts
within the business. And then they can be the go to person. So
we're gonna be learning about shared mailboxes, we're going to
be checking your DNS and making sure that's all set up
correctly. We're going to make sure you and your team have your
sharing settings correct. We're going to jump into your Google
Drive and make sure everything's nice and tidy there. We're going
to be talking about backup and data archiving. I'm just
basically going to be taking you through all of my top tips and
tricks. Rather than going and watching 100 videos on our
YouTube channel. I'm going to be in there implementing with you
in the room. So if you're interested in that, jump on any
of the links on our socials and you'll find it otherwise you'll
find it on our website and I will see you in the next video.
Thanks so much for joining and I'll catch you next time cheers