With Google launching its rebranded G Suite, we’ve seen a number of new features to help employees work together as teams on strategic and creative projects to better serve their customers. Google has also announced two new services for early adopters (at this stage) – Drive for teams and Meetings for teams.
Anyone that’s worked in just about any size organisation will be familiar with the concept of shared drives; shared volumes that are accessible by all team members where joint work can be carried out without needing to email documents and spreadsheets around constantly. The shared drive has been around since networking itself, and while Google Drive had sharing / collaboration features, it didn’t quite have the concept of a shared drive nutted out.
Well, with Drive for Teams, that changes. Managing team shares will be easier, from onboarding a new team member to off boarding a departing team member and everything and anything that generally arises in business as it either moves or grows. Enabling this within Drive has taken a re-write of the technology behind the service, curiously, which means we should see other improvements over time.
Google has been previewing Team Drives with a small set of Google for Work customers and that they will be extending this capability to more customers through an Early Adopter Program.
The next Early Adopters Program is called Meetings for Teams, which is a new meeting experience for Google Hangouts within the workplace, enabling work teams to meet without the requirement for any specialised software or hardware.
Using Meetings for Teams, anyone can participate in a meeting from any device, without the need for downloads, browser plugins, or even Google accounts. Better yet, you don’t even need to have a data connection, as a dial-in option is available too!
Meetings created through the new service have a short-link (to be shared with those on computers, mobiles, etc) and a dial-in number (for those who only have limited connectivity) so that meetings can kick-off with a minimum of fuss. Each meeting can accommodate up to 50 video participants, and with seamless integration into Calendar and instant screen sharing, work teams can be better connected than ever before.
Just like Team Drives, Google has been previewing this new meeting experience with a small set of Google for Work/Google Cloud customers and they will be extending this to more customers through an Early Adopter Program.
If you’re interested in finding out more about either Drive for Teams, Meetings for Teams or would like your business to partake in the Early Adopters Program and Google Cloud with G Suite, you can provide your information here to learn more about these Early Adopter Programs when they launch.
