Next one I want to cover is using your Google Calendar as an
appointment book. And this is a super, super awesome tool. Not
many people know about this, because plenty of other apps out
there that filled this gap for Google, in the old days of
Google workspace, one of the best things about Google and
where it really shone and stood aside from the Microsoft world,
was that Google was really open to third party developers
creating apps and extensions to integrate with the Google
workspace ecosystem, which was at the time, Google for
business, Google Apps, G Suite, you know, the million different
names that it's been through. And one of the great things was
because it was web based, that made it really easy for
developers to create additional tools. One of those tools that
many developers rushed to create was appointment scheduling
tools, and you saw things like schedule once Calendly, acuity
scheduling, and all of these applications pop up and be your
scheduling tool. It helps you with scheduling outside your
business, like internally, within a business, it's always
been pretty easy to schedule meetings with your team members,
because you can see everyone's calendars in Google workspace.
But outside the business that email ping pong of going back
and forward of like, are you free Tuesday? Oh, how about
Wednesday? I know someone took that spot. Now, how about at
11am? How about 12pm? That was a complete mess, trying to
organize things. Whereas now we can just drop someone to count a
link and say, Hey, booking a time that works for you. And it
really saved trying to organize meetings with people do you
remember those days, remember when you had to email back and
forward and say, Hey, here's the time that I was available, and
and by the time they emailed you back, then, you know, some of
those times have disappeared, absolute nightmare, bringing it
back to the Google world, this feature has always been
available in the background. But it's been a little bit hard to
find. And it's always looked absolutely ugly. I've really not
enjoyed it at all. And I've never really used it myself. But
Google are letting us know that they've just made a sexy update
to it. And so as you can see here, yeah, big updates been
made. And from here, you have the opportunity to create a page
that is actually visually appealing. And if you just need
the basics, this is probably going to be good enough that you
don't actually need to use third party scheduling software. And
so if right now you're just using Calendly, and you're just
using like the absolute basics, then this might actually be
enough for you to use. One of the things I like about this is
it's also going to create a Google meeting automatically,
you can see there, it's even going to capture people's
contact details when they make a booking. Now, I don't know if
there is an API, I don't know if it'll connect to Zapier yet, I
don't know if you'll be able to pull out those leads and
automatically put them into something like a like a CRM
system or something like that, which would be very handy. But
it is a pretty cool feature. It's there. It's available for
Google. The other thing is, as you grow and you scale a
company, as you scale an organization, it makes sense to
have less and less technology tools. Number one reason for
that is you don't want to run into subscription overwhelm
where you are just having everything add up your costs add
up your complexity adds up trying to onboard staff is a
complete pain in the butt because you end up in this place
where you've got 3 million different software apps. And
unfortunately, you know, you every time you onboard a person,
you have to sign them up for 10 different apps. And that's why I
advocate for using as much as possible everything in the
Google world, rather than doubling up with Slack and zoom.
And you know, now we can put acuity and Calendly in the same
basket as well. Because ideally, you want to keep things simple
when you scale like once you're north of 15 employees and you're
off to scale town, you just automatically start running into
multiplications of IT challenges for each additional subscription
and each additional app that you're using inside your
business. So as much as possible, even if you only have
80% of the features that you're used to using do things the
Google way, because it's going to make it easier for your
business to grow and scale. So we've had our calendar, let's
move on to the next one, Google are now introducing an encrypted
document format, which actually works on client side encryption.
And what that means is it's a level of encryption that you can
actually control yourself, this is pretty damn cool. This is
something that is coming out. You can see it's got a little
fancy logo and everything like that, who basically gives you
the opportunity to create a encrypted document. And from
that encrypted document, you get to actually control the
encryption. So there's actually a video about this. So why don't
we Why don't we roll the video pretty sure I've got audio here.
Let's give that a go. Alright, so you open a document, you're
going to call it what you want. It's going to be an encrypted
document when you started the secret sauce. Okay, so yeah,
this is obviously we're going to hide the 11 or 13 secret herbs
and spices got and then we're going to go ahead and share it
with someone. So my understanding with this, I had a
quick read of the document is that Google will not be able to
see any of that data because it's being encrypted on your
side, I assume by your account in some way. And so Oh, here we
go. You can actually use an external key service as well.
That is very cool. Wonderful. All right. And so that I assume
you could use something like a UB key, I assume you could use
something like a UB key and give you an opportunity to actually
encrypt that based on a hardware device, which is pretty damn
cool. So that looks like an excellent feature. Thank you
Google for that.
I'm not sure exactly where I would use that in my My
business, I'm pretty satisfied with Google's level of
encryption at the moment by default with their applications.
I know that between me and Google, my connections are all
encrypted. And when I'm using a chrome box, they are so locked
down on security, it's next near impossible for anyone to get
access to the actual information that's flowing back and forth
between myself and Google's documents. You'll see here, if I
open a Google document, it's probably going to be a little
hard to see. But there's a little lock key, which means
that any Google document format that you're working with is in
HTTPS. And that HTTPS is basically encrypting traffic
between your local computer and Google servers, which means
effectively, you are saying that your data between you and Google
is fully encrypted. But this is an extra level of protection if
you do want to go to an extra level of protection. Thank you
Google for that one.
pretty groovy, huh? Okay, so this is a little bit of a fun
one. Next, Google have now added emoji reactions to Google
documents, which I think is just absolutely amazing. And so when
you're in a Google Doc, instead of adding a comment, you can do
an emoji react to a paragraph to an image to anything else that's
happening in a document, I assume this will also come to
the sheets and also come to slides as well. So you can
access it from everywhere. But I just think that's absolutely
amazing. I'm all for any way for us to express how we are feeling
about something in the workplace. That's great. But
most importantly, I'm interested in anything that helps us
connect over our work. And what I mean by that is, you know,
we're in we're in a day and age now, where remote work is
becoming the norm. We've been talking about this for years and
years and years pre COVID, that remote work has been accelerated
to Now very quickly become the norm and hybrid workplaces are
the new norm, we are never going back to the way that we were
we've all been unplugged from the matrix, and no one's going
back. And so in this space of working remotely, we really need
to work out how can we still feel connected? And how can we
still do productive work with different team members, even
though we're geographically dispersed, and something like
this gives you an option to connect over your work? I'm, I'm
all for it may seem silly. And if you're someone who is over
50, or 60 years old, right now, you might be getting the bah
humbug in the back of your mind. But trust me, this is really,
really great for work. And it's gonna be great for productivity
and great for your team as well. So we have some additional, very
small basic improvements for Google meet, this may be one
that you don't care about, but I'm gonna throw it in there.
Anyway, Google meet will automatically kick you out of a
meeting. Now, if you've left it open and running for a couple of
minutes saves any embarrassment if you've forgotten to exit a
meeting and lifted running in the background. And what that
means is after a couple of minutes, it's going to give you
a prompt and then it's going to eventually kick you out. Now
this does save one really important thing. And that is
that typically when you are recording a meeting, and we use
Google meet recording, and pretty much every single meeting
that we're using, quite often, I will jump on a meeting and I'll
be briefing my marketing team on a set of ads that we want to
run, or maybe a concept that I have for a new campaign. And
because I just want to like, kind of share things stream of
consciousness with my team, you know, they just hit the record
button, they're like shit, Pete's gonna say this, once.
He's not, he's not gonna say this the same way again. So
let's hit that record button. So the table hit record. And now
just listen to me kind of like do my vision thing and share,
you know, share what I want to share with the team. Now the
team will then go and watch that back and make sure that they get
the notes perfect for exactly what I've shared, really
convenient for me, and works great for the team. Because
there's, you know, no reliance on having to worry about, you
know, getting notes down on the fly, if I'm in stream of
consciousness, sharing things. And if you're an entrepreneur
who's more on the visionary side of things, that that would be a
great feature, or great tip for you to use as well. However,
there is a challenge. And the challenge is when it gets to the
end of that meeting, maybe there's four or five people in
that meeting, sometimes one person will leave the meeting
open on their computer, and Google won't finish off the
recording. And it won't render the recording until that last
person has actually finished up. And so if they go and take their
lunch, or they take a break or whatever, you can end up waiting
for someone to exit the meeting before the recording is actually
finalized and sent out to the participants who were in that
meeting. So this is a great feature, it's basically going to
do it. Are you still there a little bit like Netflix, if
you've been watching for too long, and then eventually it's
going to kick you out? And then yeah, here we go. You can see
another prompt there. And the actual meat screen is going to
kick you out of there, which is very, very useful. All right,
our final one, this is a pretty dope feature coming to Google
documents. And that is the ability to join meetings right
from your Google Docs. And so I assume this will also come to
slides and to sheets as well. But right from a single
document, you can jump into your meeting just using Google meet.
Now, this has not yet been enabled on my Google Docs. I
can't see it here currently. I assume this has been rolled out
soon, they'll probably tell us exactly where it's going to be
rolled out. Oh, here we go. Starting me to Oh, okay, there
we go. rapid release starting rollout from April 12. So it's
only been a couple of days. It'll take a couple of weeks for
that to go right across the globe to everyone and I'll
eventually get access to it. I'll let you know. Probably on
Instagram when that happens. By the way, if you're not following
my Instagram, just head along to moriarty.co. That's just my
surname.co and you'll get the links to all my social proof
files there. And I do stories and that kind of thing when cool
new features like this come out. But basically, this is an
opportunity for when you're working on a document in, for
example, a single monitor environment, maybe you're
working on your laptop, and you want to connect with your team,
as you're collaborating on that document we do that often, when
we're working with our teams, there's an opportunity to jump
straight into that meeting from there, I think they're going to
bring this feature to Gmail, I think they're going to bring
this feature across, you know, pretty much across the whole
Google ecosystem. And so it's pretty, yeah, it's pretty darn
awesome as a feature. And yeah, I'm really looking forward to
seeing what other things Google do I see Google now have kind of
built out the pillars of each one of the applications they've
got Gmail has been amazing. For a decade, they've now got Google
Chat, which is pretty damn good can do pretty much everything
slack can do. They've got Google meat, pretty damn good can do
pretty much everything that Zoom can do Google Docs, not quite
there just yet, I would say and in what Microsoft can do, but
they're pretty damn good. I mean, the level of collaboration
that you get in Google Docs, I haven't touched a Microsoft
format document nearly 10 years. And let me tell you the
collaboration features of Google as well as the AI features, the
stuff that goes into sheets with, you know, like aI driven
pivot tables, and all that kind of stuff. It's pretty damn
amazing. Not yet enough to get the whole world across into the
Google world. But we're still working on it. And so what I see
now is that Google's built out all their kind of pillars in
their business. And what they're doing now is they're working on
the interoperability and collaboration between all of
their different apps, so you can seamlessly be effectively in any
one of their applications. And what I love is, you know, in
things like Google Drive, you can now have your calendar
available on the site, if you're in chat, you can have your
calendar there, if you're in Gmail, you've basically got
that's the dashboard for all of your work all in one place. Now,
if you're finding that you're on a small screen, and you have to
put all of these, you know, kind of like in one place, I would
say consider maybe a larger monitor, I've got a 4k monitor
that I'm working from here, which is why some of the things
look a little bit small. And that gives me the opportunity to
actually have like a document or typically my notes up on one
screen. And then on the second side of the screen, I just kind
of split it down the middle and the second side of the screen,
I'll have something like a meeting typically where I'm
working with my team as well. So if you've got this far, thank
you so much for joining. Wonderful to have you here with
me. That's it. That's the wrap. If you're interested in learning
more about this, you can head along to the Google workspace
updates blog, that blog basically has everything you
need to know about Google workspace and you can subscribe
to it if you want. But if you're not interested in that, well,
you can just go ahead and remain subscribe to our channel. And
I'm going to be doing these from time to time if they get enough
traction. So please make sure you write me a comment down the
bottom and say thank you, Peter, because that will keep me doing
more of these. And if there's anything else that you'd love to
know about Google workspace drop me a message hit me up on
socials,
I'll put that link that I shared earlier. And let me know if
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doing this a long time we've been working with Google for
over a decade now. We were one of the first partners in
Australia. And we're one of the only partners left in the small
business space, you know, many of those businesses kind of
shifted, and the product got so easy to use that many business
owners just do it themselves. But we've carved out a very
small niche for ourselves, which is helping business owners
systemize, organize and scale their business using this
technology. And so we kind of like try and find the
intersection between tech and business. And we help business
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ons, integrations and additional apps that help small businesses.
So if you're interested in learning more about that head
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