Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

Google Workspace, the company’s productivity platform you’ll forever refer to as G Suite (or even “Google Docs”), is launching a large update today that touches everything from your calendar to Google Meet and how you can use Workspace with Google Assistant.

Image Credits: Google

Indeed, the highlight here is probably that you can now use Assistant in combination with Google Workspace, allowing you to check your work calendar or send a message to your colleagues. Until now, this feature was available in beta and even after it goes live, your company’s admins will have to turn on the “Search and Assistant” service. And this is a bit of a slow rollout, too, with this capability now being generally available on mobile but still in beta for smart speakers and displays like Google’s own Nest Hub. Still, it’s been a long time coming, given that Google promised these features a very long time ago now.

The other new feature that will directly influence your day-to-day work is support for recurring out-of-office entries and segmentable working hours, as well as a new event type, Focus Time, to help you minimize distractions. Focus Time is a bit cleverer than the three-hour blocks of time you may block off on your calendar anyway in that it limits notifications during those event windows. Google is also launching a new analytics feature that tells you how much time you spend (waste) in meetings. This isn’t quite as fully featured (and potentially creepy) as Microsoft’s Productivity Score, since it only displays how much time you spend in meetings, but it’s a nice overview of how you spend your days (though you know that already). None of this data is shared with your managers.

For when you go back to an office, Google is also adding location indicators to Workspace so you can share when you will be working from there and when you’ll be working from home.

And talking about meetings, since most of these remain online for the time being, Google is adding a few new features that now allow those of you who use their Google Nest Hub Max to host meetings at home and to set up a laptop as their own second-screen experience. What’s far more important, though, is that when you join a meeting on mobile, Google will now implement a picture-in-picture mode so you can be in that Meet meeting on your phone and still browse the web, Gmail and get important work done during that brainstorming session.

Mobile support for background replace is also coming, as well as the addition of Q&As and polls on mobile. Currently, you can only blur your background on mobile.

Image Credits: Google

For frontline workers, Google is adding something it calls Google Workspace Frontline, with new features for this group of users, and it is also making it easier for users to build custom AppSheet apps from Google Sheets and Drive, “so that frontline workers can digitize and streamline their work, whether it’s collecting data in the field, reporting safety risks, or managing customer requests.”

Nobody really likes meetings — and the few people who do like them are the ones with whom you probably don’t want to have meetings. So when you’ve reached your fill and decide to reschedule some of those obligations, the usual process of trying to find a new meeting time begins. Thankfully, the Google Calendar team has heard your sighs of frustration and built a new tool that makes rescheduling meetings much easier.

Starting in two weeks, on August 13th, every guest will be able to propose a new meeting time and attach to that update a message to the organizer to explain themselves. The organizer can then review and accept or deny that new time slot. If the other guests have made their calendars public, the organizer can also see the other attendees’ availability in a new side-by-side view to find a new time.

What’s a bit odd here is that this is still mostly a manual feature. To find meeting slots to begin with, Google already employs some of its machine learning smarts to find the best times. This new feature doesn’t seem to employ the same algorithms to proposed dates and times for rescheduled meetings.

This new feature will work across G Suite domains and also with Microsoft Exchange. It’s worth noting, though, that this new option won’t be available for meetings with more than 200 attendees and all-day events.

 You set up a meeting, drop it into Google Calendar. Then someone says “let’s do it another time” and you delete it. Then they say they’re available again. What do you do? You create a new entry. Until now. Today, the Google Apps team released a small but handy feature for the web version of Google Calendar — a trash can. You can now view, permanently delete or… Read More