Google Workspace is packed with helpful features that support small to enterprise-level businesses. One of the best features that Google Workspace has to offer its customers is its regular updates.The Cloud Office team has gathered a list of recent Google Workspace updates (January and February 2022), which businesses can greatly benefit from.
Create externally friendly booking pages with appointment scheduling in Google Calendar
Google is upgrading its appointment scheduling function. Feature is now also suited for external use allowing users, including those without a Google account and outside of your domain, to schedule meetings directly in Google Calendar. Additionally, with automatic conflict detection with existing Calendar events, this feature helps reduce time spent finding and rescheduling appointments.
Available to Google Workspace Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Education Fundamentals, Education Standard, Education Plus, the Teaching and Learning Upgrade, and Nonprofits customers
Not available to Google Workspace Essentials, Business Starter, Frontline, as well as legacy G Suite Basic and Business customers
Enable discovery and sharing of Spaces in Google Chat
You can now create spaces in Google Chat that you can share with others in your organisation to join via link.
With this launch, Spaces are no longer restricted to only people added to the conversation. This update allows for the creation of topic-based conversations that can be shared more broadly within an organisation. This can be particularly useful for spaces that are oriented around:
- Sharing knowledge widely with others, including team discussions, how-to guides and mentoring opportunities.
- Organisational and policy updates.
- Situations where you need to quickly gather interested folks or those with relevant expertise, for example to investigate an outage.
- Cultural and social topics of interest, like reading, sports, or cooking.
New email draft template in Google Docs
Now in the @SmartChip Menu under the Building Blocks tab you can find a Email Draft
With this function Google Docs creates a draft email template that you can use to populate and send directly from Docs.
You can mention people in the recipient fields using the @ menu without having to remember their email addresses, and collaborate on the message body using comments and suggestions. When ready to send, simply click the button that is shown alongside an email draft. A Gmail compose window will pop up, with email fields (subject, to, cc, bcc, and body) automatically populated based on the email draft in the document.
View additional Calendar statuses in Google Chat
In addition to seeing when someone is out of office, you can now see additional Google Calendar statuses like “In a meeting” or “In focus time” in Google Chat.
Google hope’s that by surfacing these additional statuses, this will make it easier for your colleagues to identify appropriate times to message you.
Google Sheets doubles cell limit
Google increased the cell limit in Google Sheets from up to five million cells to up to ten million cells. This limit applies to new, existing, and imported files.
Over the course of the last four years, they have been steadily increasing the cell limit in Google Sheets: from 2 million to 5 million in 2019 and now to 10 million.Google Said it hopes this and future increases give users the ability to work with their data on a much greater scale in Google Sheets.
Expanded access for noise cancellation in Google Meet
All meeting attendees can now use noise cancellation capabilities in Google Meet if:
- Noise cancellation is available for the meeting organiser’s Google Workspace edition.
- If the user joins a meeting using any Google Meet hardware devices.
Additionally, if a user has noise cancellation, it will function in all meetings regardless of whether the meeting organiser has noise cancellation or not.
Google hopes that by making noise cancellation available to all meeting attendees This will help improve the quality of meetings by limiting background noise distractions.
