Business owners, it’s that time of the month again! Google has recently rolled out a number of new and exciting features for their G Suite updates in the last month. Let’s take a look at what’s in store for us this January 2019:
- New sharing options in Google Docs. This new update allows you to share documents to a non-Google user or an individual who’s outside your organization with a pin code – making the file sharing process more secure.
- Quick reply in Hangouts Chat. Google is bringing their AI smarts into Hangouts Chat. It lets you do quick replies with emojis to boot for that added personal touch.
- Additional group feature in admin panel. The latest update finally allows us to work with groups. It even gives you the option to switch it on or off in the admin panel.
Full summary of all updates in December 2018: https://goo.gl/duPCg2
Go here for more info on the latest G Suite updates: https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/
To know more about G Suite and the latest updates, you may call 1-300-88-00-25 or you can reach us via email at [email protected]
TRANSCRIPTION:
Good day there. Pete Moriarty here with another video for you on all the latest updates to G Suite that are important for business owners. These are our highlights on the most important updates from the last month.
First up, we’ve got new sharing options coming to Google Docs, and this is one of my favorites because it’s been something that’s been a little bit curious for me for a long time. Google are allowing you to enter a beta program where they are letting business owners share documents with a PIN code for access. What that means is when you go to share a document with someone outside your organization, if they don’t yet have a Google account, what you had previously had to do was share a link, and that link would be kind of forwarded onto anyone else. It wasn’t really all that secure. Anyone you share, that document is going to be effectively linked to that email address that you’ve shared to. So they’ll open their email. They’ll have to enter a PIN code to actually access the document, which will be sent to their email. So it stops anyone forwarding it along unless they’re going to also go ahead and literally manually share the PIN code, too.
What I like about this is it gives you yet another way of sharing documents outside your organization without having to get someone to mess around with signing up for an account or asking them for their Gmail account just to access your documents. You can always share something via the link, but you’ve got to be careful that anyone can effectively forward that share link email or post that link anywhere on the web. They could even tweet if they wanted to, and potentially share access to your document.
Next up, Google are bringing their AI smarts into Hangouts Chat. Now, you would have already noticed the quick reply feature inside of Gmail. First, it came to the mobile app. It’s also come to the desktop or the web browser app, and you’re also seeing other cool things in Gmail like automatic compose and all those groovy features coming.Google has started to add all of their machine learning around text and around quick replies into Hangouts Chat. So you’ll immediately notice, when you’re saying chats, you’ve got these few little buttons down at the bottom, and those buttons are letting you access different quick replies to send straight back to your contacts. Don’t worry about them being inhuman or robotic. They’re very, very smart, and they also add emojis in there as well, which is a nice little personalized touch.
If you didn’t already know, Google have now said that one in five emails are actually being sent by their AI suggested smart replies. So expect to see more of these kind of productivity features being added right across the board in G Suite.
Now, thirdly, this one isn’t a massive feature, but it’s one of those little nice-to-haves if you’re used to digging around in the admin panel. Google are now allowing us to work with groups when we assign different applications and switch them on and off inside the admin panel. In the past, what you had to do was actually set up an organizational unit, and if you wanted to, for example, enable or disable Gmail or Calendar or Drive or Google Sites for a certain group of staff, you’d have to configure the organizational units, plop people in there, and then adjust things basically from there, which was a second step if you were already using the group service.
Once you’ve got your staff set up in Groups, which we highly recommend, because if you’re using Groups, you can use them for Calendar. You can use them for sharing in Drive, in Team Drives, right across Google Sites. You can use them in Hangouts Chat as well. Groups are great. Now, once you’ve got all your groups set up, the new feature inside of the admin panel allow you to switch on and off services and and also be applied to Groups. What that means is not having to double up with setting up organizational units. If you’re a small business, and by small business I mean someone who’s got less than 30, 40 or 50 employees, well, this is a simple way of managing who gets access to what services.
If you haven’t already thought about well, why would I want to restrict services to some of my staff, this is a great way of, for example, restricting contractors from accessing sensitive information by using something like Google Sites. Or, if you just have users who you just want to have an email mailbox and no access to any other services across the business, well, then you can switch services off one-by-one.
That’s a wrap for this month. In the description below, we actually have a link to all of the updates, including the ones that we didn’t cover that have been released in the last month. Not every single update in the last few weeks will actually be included in this video because we record these a little bit after all of the updates are released. So if you’d like access to everything, and I mean as they are actually released by Google, well, you can jump onto our community, which is called Cloud Concierge.
Not only do you get access to four nightly training webinars, unlimited access to all of our support team. You also get access to what the latest updates are from Google, sometimes before they’re even released to public channels. So we’re going to be sharing with you what are our R&D and all of the things that we’re working on in the background with the Google world, and we share them exclusively with our members before we take these to the public channels. If you’re interested, head along to itGenius.com, or you can contact us by one of the links below. Until next time, catch you later.
