Google has recently rolled out a number of exciting G Suite updates in the last month. In this video, we’re going to see what’s new and we’re going to take a look at the features that will be useful for business owners in December 2018.
Full summary of all updates in November 2018: https://goo.gl/9p71tj
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
Go here for more info on the latest G Suite updates: https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/
Transcription:
Hey there. Pete Moriarty here, bringing you a news update video with all of the latest updates for G Suite that you should know about as a business owner. We’ve taken just the best updates to highlight in this video. Listen up because this is going to be very useful for you.
Google Dashboard
A little over a month ago Google have released their new activity dashboard, and this is a way of you peeking into what activity has been happening in each one of your documents. This is very useful if you’re collaborating with team members and you’ve perhaps been working on a document and a spreadsheet and you want to see, if you’ve shared that with someone else, has that other person actually accessed the document, have they viewed it, have they made any changes.
What the activity dashboard does is it shows you all of the collaborators on the document and their actual activity on the document as well. How do you get access to it? Well, up in the top right-hand corner of the document, you look for a little icon that looks a bit like the Harry Potter lightning bolt squiggle, and that’s going to bring up the menu to show all of the activity on that doc.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to force everybody to opt into this. Everyone’s opted in by default and they can opt out on a document by document basis or opt out of all tracking completely if they wish. There’s no way to stop people opting out. Hashtag privacy. But this is very useful for those that opt in for you to be able to see what’s going on with the document without having to hit someone up on email or on instant message or in your task management program. So thoroughly recommend you leave this switched on and you make use of it with your team members as well.
Google Classroom
The next big bit of news is Google Classroom, and that has now come to all editions of G Suite. Classroom was a feature that was previously only available to tertiary education, schools, and other higher education organizations. This is how Google brings their power of the magic of G suite and collaboration into the classroom, and Google have thought up some pretty darn cool tools that teachers now use across many different schools that have Google Classroom and Google for Education rolled out all around the world.
What are some of the features of Google Classroom? Well, for starters you can set up students. And if you’re in a business, students might be employees, they might be contractors, they might even be customers. And students can participate in quizzes, be assigned classes, be assigned a teacher or someone who’s instructing them, and there’s all kinds of ways that they can both be issued and submit work as well as having the quiz integration with a marking feature. All kinds of really cool stuff in there.
This has been begged for for years to be brought into the main business suite of G Suite, and it’s finally being made available. You need to opt into this. You need to go into your admin panel and switch it on in other services. But once you’ve got access to Classroom, you can use this for all kinds of things internally. One of the things that I might use it for as a business owner myself is for internal training of our staff. We want to know who’s completed what courses, what systems and what process have they viewed, and of course we want to create some quizzes and get some marking and some scoring happening. And so we’re going to start to use this for our internal training and make sure that we’ve got everybody well organized right inside of Google Classroom.
So there’s heaps of resources all over YouTube and the web for Classroom, and we will be doing a follow up video on that as well.
Google Hangouts Meet
Next, let’s talk about Hangouts. Hangouts has had a lot of work done to it in the past couple of years. It’s been completely rewritten from the ground up and it’s now Hangouts Meet. And if you haven’t given Hangouts Meet a go, well, you really should. It’s got some great features like being able to share a hangout with absolutely anyone just based on a URL. They do have to have a Chrome browser or have the app downloaded if they’re joining from a mobile, but they don’t have to have a Google account. They can jump straight into a meeting without having to register, just like unlike the old Hangouts rather. And it means that they can join a meeting in high definition very, very easily. And that’s great for not only your internal meetings but also sharing with a customer or a client or someone outside your business.
Two key changes that have just happened to Hangouts Meet that are really exciting. Number one, if you’re looking to invite someone to the meeting once you’ve already started one, well in the old version of Hangouts used to be able to kind of call them using Google Plus. What you can do is you can invite someone. You just go to the People menu and you click on add a person, and that flicks them an email. It’s not as great as ringing them and buzzing their device, but flicking them an email is not too bad. If someone’s forgotten to show up to the meeting or maybe you want to easily send a link to a client or someone who’s outside your business to access, well using that add a person you pop in their email address and it sends off a message.
The second option that you can do is you can also add by phone. Unfortunately, this feature is US only right now. But if you add by phone, it will actually call their phone and dial them straight into the meeting from there. Remember there’s always the option for them to dial in. With every meeting, there’s a dial in number. But if you’re for example in Australia and you want to get access to this feature, you can upgrade to the Enterprise version of G Suite and you’ll get Australian numbers for people to dial into.
Those are the first ones. The next feature that’s been added to Hangouts Meet is the ability to have more participants on your meeting. This is going to be useful for small businesses, especially you can now have up to 50 people on any Hangout meeting. It was previously limited to 25. If you do need more than 50, you can either use the Google Hangouts Live feature which was previously Hangouts on Air. You can have literally 100,000 people on there if you want. But if you want to have more participants from inside your company and have each person contributing, again you’ve got to upgrade to the Enterprise version of G Suite. It’s a little bit cost prohibitive in my opinion for small business, but if you’re someone who can make use of some of the features like maybe recording your Hangouts as well, well then the Google G Suite Enterprise version might be something that you want to consider.
Gmail Offline
One more trick, and this one’s come to Gmail, is the ability to access all of your Gmail emails offline without having to bother with a plugin. Previously if you wanted to use Gmail offline you had to go to the app store, set up a plugin, log into the plugin, dig around with the settings, all of those kind of things. Well, now it’s been built right into Gmail and it means there’s no fuss with getting access to your emails when you’re offline. So if you’re on a plane or an internet café without internet that would be weird. Maybe you’re in a café that’s not an internet café or if you’re sitting at the beach and need to get work done, you can use Gmail offline and not only read your emails but also compose, go through your folders, and dig through the last couple of months worth of email.
To get access to the new Gmail offline, as long as you’re on the new version of Gmail which everyone’s been upgraded and effectively forced to be upgraded now, you just go into your setting, go to offline settings, and you can switch on Gmail offline and choose how much mail will be downloaded to your machine. This is super useful. And keep in mind it’s going to take a little while to download initially, but once that’s done it’s available any time you need it and you can open up your laptop and get work done. Just remember to make sure that the latest emails have been downloaded before you jump on that 15 hour flight.
Admin Panel Update: Two-Step Authentication
The final update here is one in the admin panel, and this is about security. I know security is not something that people like to think about until you get hacked. And one of the easiest ways that you can actually up your security if you’re a business user of G Suite is to go into your admin panel and switch on force two-step authentication for all users. What that’s going to do is give you an extra line of defense just in case anyone somehow gets access to both your username and your password for G Suite.
There’s an additional feature that’s been added to G Suite which is a little nice to have, which helps you to make those passwords just that little bit more secure. In the past you could set some basic password policies like choosing the length, but you couldn’t really do much more than that. And Google’s added some more “enterprisey” style features to their Google passwords. Not only now can you force everyone to have more complex passwords, but you can also have them set those passwords to expire after a certain amount of time and you can also see what the complexity of each person’s password is within your business. I recommend setting a password expiry for a small business probably no more frequent than once a year. That’s probably going to be okay, especially if you have two factor authentication switched on. But if you’ve got that added, then it’s going to be a good move to make the password policies just a little bit stricter than welcome123, which is a standard password that many people unfortunately still use.
That’s a wrap for this month’s video, and if you like what you see remember to give us a thumbs up and drop your comments below and let us know what you’re thoughts are. And of course, make sure you subscribe to the channel to get access to our latest notifications when we drop new videos. We’ll also have a link below to all of the updates from Google for the past month, all of the ones that we didn’t talk about in this video. You may wish to see some of the more advanced ones, also the ones that are more suitable to larger businesses as well.
If you haven’t already, you may be interested in joining our community where we have these kind of videos every fortnight and we have exclusive trainings on all the best features of G Suite, making sure you and all of your staff are up to date on everything Google of course and all of the unlimited support from our amazing Google support team that you may need.
Anyway, catch you in the next one. Take care.
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
