DREW ROWNY: Welcome to the session on Boosting Teamwork
and Collaboration with Google Chat and Spaces.
Hi.
I'm Drew Rowny, and I'm a group product manager
and lead the teams responsible for Gmail, Google Chat,
and Spaces, driving forward our shared
vision of a deeply integrated home for productivity
at the heart of Workspace.
As companies emerge from more than a year of fully
remote work, into hybrid work, including my very own team here
at Google, we know that a key question we are all asking
is how to help our teams collaborate efficiently
from anywhere.
We understand that 74% of companies
intend to shift some employees to remote permanently.
So it's critical we help teams to build connections
and to participate fully no matter
where team members are located.
After reflecting on the lessons of the past year
of remote work, what we recognize
is that people need a new type of dedicated,
shared space where ideas can flow freely,
information is easily accessible,
and great work can get done.
That's why we introduced Spaces, the evolution of Rooms
in Google Chat, earlier this year.
Spaces are the central place where
people and teams of all sizes can share information
on topics, make progress on projects,
and build community as teammates.
Spaces are the new home in Google Workspace
for getting more done together.
Let's walk through some of the ways
that Spaces can help teams of all sizes by helping teams
share knowledge, collaborate better, stay
on top of what is important, and empower large organizations
to stay connected, all with enterprise-grade security
at the core.
First, to help people find the information they
need to get work done effectively,
users will soon be able to make a space discoverable.
So anyone interested in the topic
can be part of the conversation by finding and joining
that space.
We believe that this will help our customers further
strengthen company engagement and team culture
and improve the availability of information to fuel innovation.
The content within a discoverable space
will be searchable, even if you're not part of the space.
For organizations that value transparency,
this is a great way to create openness and make connections,
ensuring that everyone has easy access to information
and allowing communities to form and grow.
We've worked with customers that have
a wide range of internal data-sharing practices.
That's why we are building discoverable spaces
with configurability in mind, so organizations
can choose how to deploy them with defaults
to fit the culture that they want to foster.
And with other features like inline topic threading
coming soon, people can reply to any message
within a space, which allows for even deeper discussions
and collaboration among team members.
It also allows subsets of people within the space
to have sidebar conversations and dive
into more detail about specific topics
without disturbing the main flow of the conversation.
Second, we know that collaboration happens
across multiple products.
So we continue to integrate our solutions to help
people work better together.
For example, in Google Chat and Spaces,
we introduce side-by-side editing
with Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides,
making it easy to find and collaborate on a document
without having to switch tabs.
So you can have the context of the conversation
while putting the finishing touches on that design document
or making changes to the project proposal.
We also made it possible to natively create a doc, sheet,
or slide directly from within a space to save users time.
Soon, you'll be able to share to a space
directly from a Google Doc.
Spaces also works seamlessly with Tasks, Calendar,
and Drive.
We're building even deeper integrations
across more services, including the ability
to see the status of other members
within your space pulled directly from their calendars.
And we've enabled Spaces integrations with other apps
to improve collaboration.
For example, we've been working with Atlassian
to create a great Jira experience within Chat
and Spaces making project tracking with team
members faster and easier.
Third, we know that sharing information can
be overwhelming, especially if you work across multiple work
streams, or you're just joining a new team.
To help make it easier to stay on top of what's
most important to you, you can pin spaces
at the top of the list.
And you will soon be able to pin important messages
within a space, making it easy to find the most relevant
information and stay connected.
I personally keep the space for my cross-functional leadership
team and the Spaces dedicated to my top two to three priorities
for the week pinned at the top so I can proactively
move them forward and make sure decisions
are made quickly and clearly, so no one ever feels stuck.
I also use the files tab constantly to check back
on all the materials we are working on
or to reference a key piece of information built up
in the Spaces knowledge base.
Fourth, we are building Spaces with large communities
in mind, adding support over the coming months for larger groups
and organizations to stay in touch
in a single, dedicated space, whether an office or remote.
We are introducing roles with space managers
able to help drive and promote healthy conversations
and elevate critical information to foster collaboration
with member management and content moderation
capabilities.
This capability will help to bridge the gap between leaders
and employees by facilitating constructive engagement,
sharing knowledge broadly, and enabling employees
to build social and work-related communities.
And finally, safety is and has always been a top priority,
with our Google Workspace tools being secure by default
and private by design.
Google Workspace was built in the cloud
with enterprise-grade security at the core.
And we're bringing more tools to keep our customers
and their data safe.
We want to do even more to give you enhanced information
security.
So we are excited to announce Data Loss Prevention, or DLP,
for Google Chat.
You can sign up for the private beta today,
and it will soon be coming to all.
This will help prevent sensitive and confidential information
from leaking outside of your organization,
give admins more control over what users can share,
and alert them about policy violations
so they can quickly investigate and take action.
It's critical to have robust administrative and security
features.
We built Chat and Spaces so admins
have tools for content moderation, managing Spaces,
and ensuring the right rules are in place for communication
internally and across domains and companies.
To wrap up, thank you so much for joining me today
to learn more about boosting teamwork and collaboration
with Spaces and Google Chat.
We are excited and committed to helping our customers succeed
with Spaces as the dedicated, secure home for getting
more done together.
Please also remember to check out our other great Google
Workspace sessions to deepen your understanding of how
Workspace is enabling hybrid work and new patterns
of collaboration.
You can explore our Workspace website and Learning Center
to learn more about specific products
and how you can ready your team and organization
to adopt Workspace.
And lastly, you can stay on top of all the great Workspace news
on the "Google Cloud" blog as well as the "Workspace Updates"
blog.
Thank you for listening.
I hope today's session was helpful in understanding
how you can boost teamwork and collaboration with Google Chat
and Spaces.
Thanks again.