Better group chat controls are coming to Google Hangouts

Many organizations use group chats in Google Hangouts to manage projects, plan events, and participate in other chat and collaboration tasks. We’re happy to announce that in the coming weeks several features are coming to Google Hangouts to make it more easy and useful to use group chats at work.

Share your group chats with short links

Group chat participants can now share a link to invite others to join the chat. This is particularly useful for on boarding new team members to a project, or to reach everyone in a mailing list. Rather than adding everyone at once, people can opt-in to the group chat.

link share combined

 

Search for groups from your Google Hangouts contacts list

In order to make it easier to get to your group chats, you can also easily find your group conversations by searching for the group name or participant name.

GroupSearch Cropped

Additional controls to manage group chat access

When team members leave a project, it may be necessary to remove them from group chats. Now, anyone who is directly invited to a chat will be able to remove others from the group chat, removing that person’s access to the chat history and notifying the group participants. Only by being directly invited back by someone already in the group, can the former member rejoin the chat.

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Note for Administrators

These Google Hangouts changes to group chats will continue to follow the administrative controls you’ve set in the Admin console. You can learn more in this Help Center article.

Link sharing and removing from groups on Google Hangouts is now available on all platforms. Group search is already available on Android and will be coming to iOS soon. Finally, we’re looking at additional ways to make group conversations even better in the future, so please stay tuned.

Launch Details
Release track:
Launching to both Rapid release and Scheduled release

Rollout pace:
Gradual rollout (potentially longer than 3 days for feature visibility)Impact:
All end usersAction:
Change management suggested/FYI

Reference by Google.com

Training For Google Apps

Whether you’ve just gone Google or have been using Google Apps for years, IT departments always have a need to train new users and keep them up to date on the latest technologies. In a perfect world, each employee would have helpful IT staff by their side to guide them every step of the way, but that’s not always possible, nor is it really practical. That’s why we are excited to announce Training for Google Apps, the newest training resource available to all Google Apps organizations.

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What is Training for Google Apps?

Designed to be simple and efficient, Training for Google Apps is a new interactive in-app learning experience to help users get quickly up and running with Google Apps. Built on the Google Cloud Platform, Training for Google Apps acts like a virtual coach inside of the Google Apps interface. Users have access to voice and text interactive modules that are searchable by topic within any of the Google Apps products, which includes Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Google+, and even Classroom.

Modules are available in Japanese, German, Chinese, English, French, and more.

How can Training for Google Apps help me?

Based on our customer studies, we’ve seen that organizations that deploy Training for Google Apps see an average of 35 percent higher adoption across Apps products. Here are a few examples of things you can quickly get your admins and end-users trained on:

  • Setting up your email signature
  • Recovering Deleted Email
  • Set Expiring Dates for Shared Documents
  • And hundreds more

 

 

key-feature-inside-google app

Learn about key features right inside the app!

Whether it’s to master Google Apps, Google Classroom or the Google Apps Admin console, Training for Google Apps can help your entire organization.

Here’s how to get started

Training for Google Apps can be deployed quickly and easily to all your Chrome and ChromeOS users, all from the Google Apps Admin console. You can use Chrome Management (available to all Google Apps customers) to centrally manage installation of the extension. Please see Help Center article for more information.
We look forward to hearing how you’ll use Training for Google Apps to help your users with the critical task of change management and application support.

Launch Details
Release track:
Launching to both Rapid release and Scheduled release

Rollout pace:
Full rollout (1-3 days for feature visibility)

Impact:
All end users (if deployed by Administrator)

Courtesy by:Google.com