Over the year, video conferencing apps have become the most critical tool for many businesses in collaborating with their teams. Unlike other video meeting solutions, Meet is deeply integrated with the rest of Google Workspace, which makes it incredibly easy to schedule and attend meetings, with advanced security, reliability, and management tools.
Here are some things we’ll cover in this session:
- Start and join meetings from any device (even without downloading the app)
- Breakout rooms are now available to more Workspace customers
- Virtually raise your hand to answer or ask a question during meetings
- …and more of Google Meet’s exciting new features!
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To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
Transcription:
My name is Peter Moriarty. And in this presentation I’m covering all the new features of Google meet. Now it’s early 2021. And throughout 2020, when zoom rose to prominence, Google found themselves on the backfoot with video conferencing. And when the pandemic happened in 2020, what we expected was that everyone would finally start using Google mate, because I know that it’s such an awesome tool for Google workspace users. However, what actually happened was everyone just started working from home. And if they had already been using other tools for video conferencing, they pretty much just use their existing tools at home. And so most people just fire up zoom, and continued working in exactly the same way that they were working. Now, what that meant for Google was that finally they got their butts into gear, because so many people were using zoom instead of their own platform, even their own users of Google workspace, Google actually had to get their butt into gear, with building out the new features in Google meet, which they have done. And I’ve got to say they’ve done an amazing job. And so today, I’m going to be taking you through some of the best new features of Google made what they are, if you don’t already know about all of them, which there are a lot, you will, by the end of this presentation, know about all of them. And if you’re already a Google workspace user, I’ve got a special offer at the end of this as well. Now, if you don’t know who we are, we are a small business consultancy, and we help small and medium business owners all over the world help get their tech in order so they can play a bigger game. And what that means is making sure that you as a business have technology as a core strategy of your business growth. And that means that as your business grows and changes, and you get your team on board, your technology is facilitating the business strategies that you’re putting in place. And it means that it’s facilitating the best practice that you implement with your team members. So how do we do that we use a tool called the growth roadmap. And this basically is a roadmap for businesses at different stages of business. And it tells you what technology tools, you should be focusing on what’s going to give you the most leverage, and what is going to help you in whatever stage of business you’re in. And if you’re interested in that head along to our YouTube channel, and go to the playlists function. And inside the playlist, you’ll see we have dedicated playlists, no matter what stage of business you’re at, there’s plenty there to learn. Today, we’re talking about Google meet. And I’m going to be taking you guys through all of the new features. As I said, there’s a lot of them. So we’re gonna jump straight in and start getting rocking and rolling.
First up, you would have noticed that in Google’s unified inbox, they’ve now added a meet link to start an instant meeting. Now personally, I don’t use this all that much, because I find myself scheduling meetings, on calendars, most of my meetings are scheduled. And when I’ve got a meeting scheduled in a calendar event, is just automatically going to give me a link to jump straight into the meeting, making it nice and easy. The other way that I typically do impromptu meetings is if I’m chatting to someone inside Google Chat, I can just click one button and actually drop a Google meetup link in there to join a meeting, which makes it really simple. And they’re kind of like the two ways that I do my meetings. But on the days that I’ve got lots of meetings scheduled, I actually use the meet scheduler page. And that is [email protected]. And so this is basically a placeholder page, which shows you all of the different meetings that you have scheduled on any particular day. And so on a particular day, you’ll be able to see all of your ad schedules of meetings. And let me show you what my one actually looks like. So I’ll open up my Google meet here. And you’ll see my real Google meetings, you can see all my meetings that are that are actually coming up for today. There we go. o once you’ve got all your meetings scheduled, and you’ve got them all connected to your Google Calendar, it’s just a matter of clicking one button to join each one of those meetings as you need to make my life super simple. Now for businesses who are perhaps have an office set up, and you have a boardroom, or a meeting room, and you’d like to use Google meet there, where you can just buy yourself a cheap TV and plug in a Chrome for meetings hardware kit. And that’s basically a microphone and a speaker and a little box there with a remote. And it lets you with one button, click straight into each one of your meetings. And just like it did on that little page, it queues up each one of those meetings. And that’s a shared resource that your team can book calendars and book meetings into, and actually use that from time to time in the business, which is super duper useful.
So let’s talk about the next feature. And that is now you can have a tiled view and see absolutely everyone inside Google meet. Now we used to have to do this with a third party plugin. There was a plugin for Google Chrome, which was created to allow people to use this. But now Google has actually built it in thanks to the popular gallery view inside of zoom, you can now also do this inside of Google mate. Now, depending on the speed and processor of your computer, that will determine exactly how many people you can have. But you can have up to 49 participants on one screen, which is pretty damn cool. And you can also still see the presentation if people have presentations there as well. So if anyone has something that they’re presenting yet, you also want to see the whole team, what’s their reactions and you know, feel that personal connection. And then this is a great tool to be able to do that.
Next up, and this was a really really highly requested one. I Google have created breakout rooms inside Google meet and so if you’ve got a you know, maybe a training session that you’re doing and you’ve got, you know, a bunch of team members and you want to break them up into little sharing circles, then you can use breakout rooms for that. And it works great, you can see him there, kind of like automatically sorts people in there. And you can even automatically set a timer. And that will let people in the rooms know that they’ve got a certain amount of time left, you can hit the shuffle button, and that’ll just automatically distribute people across the different meetings.
Next up, Google have added a q&a section. And I really love this one. This is probably one of my favorite features. Because what this allows you to do is when you’re presenting have your audience dropping Q and A’s. Now, is it as good as a fully fledged webinar platform, like the webinar feature of zoom, where you can have people pre register and they get email sequences before and after? No, it’s not quite that sophisticated. But it is great if you’re doing a presentation, and you want just a little bit more interactivity. What I love about these questions is, once someone asks a question, everyone else gets to democratically vote on the question. And so they can actually put a little thumbs up there. And that will bring the most popular questions up to the top, you can also sort by the oldest or the newest, if you want. But if you want to be the most engaged with your audience, you can allow them to democratically choose which questions they would like to have answered, which I think is a pretty darn cool feature.
As well as that Google have also added polls. And so that’s a way of building more interactivity with your audience. Remember that as we’re working with an audience online, we want to make sure that the audience actually has as much engagement as possible, everyone who’s turned into zombies, which is basically like, you know, sitting there up straight, yes, I’m pretending to look at the screen. For me, that’s a pretty wooden way of actually doing way of actually doing, you know, interactivity between yourself and your audience. And so, you know, we try and keep meetings as light and casual as possible. But for those larger meetings, where there’s lots of people, something like a poll to make sure that you’re keeping people engaged in your presentation is definitely a great idea.
Now, finally, one of the most favorite ones, or maybe the most fun one, is that you can change your backgrounds and Google do this without any local processing on your local computer, which is great, it means it doesn’t slow it down, like zoom can do sometimes. But the background is all done via AI and all done online in the browser. And so as soon as you are connected to your Google mate, you can switch your background. And that happens automatically. And I believe that is also on its way to mobiles as well, I don’t know for sure about that one. But I believe it is also coming on its way as well. But Google are basically using all of their AI smarts, and all of their cloud computing power to to help make that happen online, which is pretty darn cool.
Now, just like zoom and Google have also introduced a waiting room. As you can see, here, there’s multiple people waiting to join this call, you can click one button and admit everyone, or, or one by one, let people enter the room. What I like about that is even if they don’t have a Google address, they can still join a meeting. And they will just be asked to enter their name. And so one of the early criticisms of Google Hangouts was that everyone had to have a Google account for people to actually access. And what Google meat now allows you to do is just share a URL. And so anyone can actually join the meeting via that URL, they don’t even have to sign into Google or register for a Gmail account with one button, they can just click themselves straight in, which is pretty damn handy.
Next up, we have the raised hand feature. And that allows you to put your hand up, and it’ll bubble you up to the top. Again, another useful tool if you’re having a conversation, and you know, people don’t want to butt in or you know, bother people on chat. This allows you to jump straight in and let someone know that you want to ask a question of the presentation.
And then finally, there are live captions, if you didn’t already know that they are there. Live captions allow you to have whatever content is being shared captioned, for you automatically on the fly. And this is a phenomenal feature. Really, really cool. And it’s now been extended to multiple languages as well. So I think that one is shown in Spanish, there we go. It actually shows you the different, different conversations happening live. And when you enable those, it’s actually only just showing up for you. So it doesn’t enable it for absolutely everyone in the meeting is just here. So if you’re someone who’s you know, a little bit hard of hearing, or maybe the language that the meeting is in is not your first language, then you can actually use captions. And some people prefer reading to listening, because they’re just, you know, more kind of visual, then that’s also pretty cool tool for that as well. So you know, I love that Google is starting to build in those kind of accessibility features. And it makes meetings easier for everyone, and especially easier for those who may not be fully able to, to access meetings in the same way that we do if there is some kind of impairment in how they work.
So finally, Google recording of meetings. This is not a new feature. But let me tell you, this was highly requested to be added to Google’s business plan. So previously, recording meetings was limited to the enterprise plan, which I thought was a ridiculous decision. Google have thankfully listened to their users. I’ve switched on recording for all Google workspace Business Standard plan. So you need to have a Business Standard plan, which was the previous Google G Suite business plan, which before that was G Suite unlimited. And before that, I don’t know what it was. But if you’re on the Business Standard plan, and you have to upgrade your account from G Suite to workspace, if you haven’t already done that, yes, then you can access this amazing recording feature. And honestly, this is one of my favorite features going in Google right now. Because when I am presenting training, or if I’m presenting a meeting, and I want to make sure that it’s captured, I just hit that record button. And then once the meeting is completed, it automatically pops an email off to everyone who was a part of the meeting, and then it will automatically save the recording straight into my Google Drive. And that means that it’s safe and secure and backed up to my Google account. One of my biggest challenges when I used zoom for a brief period of time, was that when I recorded a meeting, I had to do all the processing on my local computer. And then after the processing was done, I’d already be in my next meeting. And, you know, I’d have to like then upload it into Google Drive and find the right folder and you know, put a name on there to name what the meeting was. And all those kind of things were a manual process. And I wanted to just get on to my next meeting. Whereas with Google meet, when I hit the record button, after the meetings done, it’s already put it in my Google Drive, there’s no uploading required, it’s not going to hog my bandwidth, it’s not going to slow down my computer, when it’s converting the recording, and zoom or even had a security breach of their recordings, where people were able to see other people’s recordings, to me, that just concerned the crap out of me. And so I just find it very difficult to trust any of zooms, recording or encryption overall, anymore. And so I much prefer using Google, they do not have any recorded cases of major security breaches or, or major data loss from Google workspace ever. And so I much would prefer to trust Google with my data there with my meeting recordings. So this is enabled for all Business Standard accounts. If you’re not yet on a Business Standard account with workspace, you can have a chat to our team if you would like to be upgraded to one of those accounts.
So if you are currently a Google workspace user, and you’re wondering how we can help, I’m going to show you a couple of ways that it genius may be of service for your business. If you’re a current workspace subscriber, and you have more than 10 employees in your business, well, you actually have access to some pretty exclusive discounts on the workspace upgrade. So don’t upgrade your account yet. We are a reseller, and we can get you behind the scenes discounts not available to the public. And so have a chat to our team just by jumping on the chat link. And we’ll be able to help you out with that. Even if you’re a small business, we have plenty of options to help you out as well. And we even accept sole traders. And so if you’re just getting started out in your business journey, then we are absolutely here to help you out. So if you are in the early stages of business, and you have, let’s say just a launch business startup business growth business, no matter where you are, our team will be able to take you through our growth roadmap and show you what kind of technology is going to suit you best for the stage of business that you’re in. And that might be implementing a CRM system, it might be setting up task management, it might be making sure that all your systems and processes are well documented in one and in one place, it may be setting up a business dashboard. So you can see all of your business data live no matter what your team or you are up to. Or it may be something like the basics, like getting your password safe and secure in a password vault or setting up backup for all of your team members. So there’s no chance of you losing data, there’s plenty of ways that we can help you. Now if you haven’t already become a member of it genius doesn’t cost you anything extra, all you need to do is transfer your billing for your licenses into our billing reseller relationship. And all that means is you pay us instead of paying Google the same price, but you get a bunch more features. One of those is access to our Google Classroom. And we have brand new, freshly created training videos and courses for you and your staff to learn all of the basics, and some pretty cool advanced tips inside Google workspace. And we imagine this to be just part of your onboarding process for any new employee that you bring on board. If you want them to be a Google workspace superstar. You want them to use all the tools to the best of their ability, you want them to be productive. And you want to stop being the tech support person for your team. When someone doesn’t know how to share something in Google Drive or put it in the right folder or you know, create a Google meet for you and the rest of your team. Well, using Google Classroom to train your team is a great idea. And so inside each one of our classrooms, we’ve got a curriculum of training on different elements of Google workspace. And there’s quizzes so that your team can actually get a certificate once they have completed the training. And so that means if you make this part of your HR onboarding process, then your team will be trained up. And you’ll know they’ll be trained up when they pass our quizzes. And they’re not easy, but they’re light enough that they’ll make sure that your team can actually pass them. And that means that you have your team up to scratch on everything Google and it wouldn’t hurt for you to jump in there too if you’re a business owner for you to brush up on your skills, so you get free access to this if you transfer your licenses into us as well as a number of other free support goodies and little perks from just from our team for being a customer of it genius doesn’t cost you anything extra for your licenses. And this is not mandatory for you to become a concierge member if you’re interested in a concierge product. That’s awesome. But this is just for you transferring your licenses in to us and we hope that you do if you’re interested in chatting to our team, drop us a message there via our website it genius.com check out our other videos on our YouTube channel. We will see you next time make sure you’re subscribed please make sure you like this video if you loved it. If you didn’t like it, that’s totally fine as well, and share it with someone who you think may find us till next time guys. Catch you later.
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
