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Welcome back to a brand new year! While the team is getting ready to deliver all the new features that Google can throw at us and you are emptying your inboxes to start 2020 off the right way, why don't we take a deep breath and look what all of us Google users accomplished last year?
What were we up to in 2019?
What were we up to in 2019?
Calendar: RSVP forwarding
Google calendar can now deal with forwarded invitations. Means that you can ... forward your invitations and others can accept them, and be added to the guest list. This has traditionally been a huge pain.
Chat: Chatbots
Chat has been a bot platform from day one - now the capabilities are in place that allow for the necessary controls and safeguards around bots. Many teams have started developing bots, and 2020 should see rush of creativity in this space.
Drive: Team Drives renamed to Shared Drives
I don't know why I list this here - everybody hated this change, me the most because I still say Team Drives every time. Behind the scenes, Google is working on major changes to Drive and folders, so the name change will hopefully make more sense in the future. Making sure this change did not surprise PwC was still a major project for our team.
Editors: Native Office Editing
This was hands-down the most under-appreciated feature launch of 2019. Docs, Sheets and Slides can now edit documents from their pre-cloud counterparts without converting them. Meaning that you can upload an xlsx file to Drive and edit it in Sheets, then download it (still as xlsx) and everything looks and works as you expect. There are minor gotchas, but in general it works and keeps getting better. I sense more blog-posts coming.
Gmail is now able to display AMP content, meaning you can receive interactive emails.
Gmail: Confidential Mode
Gmail is now able to send highly protected emails which can be recalled, expire, not be printed or forwarded and not be accessed from people you delegate your account to.
You can now schedule email to be sent at specific dates - both on the web and on the official mobile clients.
AI supported, predictive typing is now available in most languages. You are probably using it without knowing it.
Groups: Access Rights refresh
This was a behind-the-scenes change - listed as an example here because we deal with a lot of these as well. Google has simplified access rights for the notoriously complicated powerful Google groups settings and we needed to make sure that this did not impact you nor the dozens of systems and services which can no longer work without Google groups.
Jamboards: New experience and Meet/Chromebox integration
Jamboards got much more useful by essentially becoming Chromeboxes. You can now have full-screen calls with jamboards, share your screens etc.
Jamboards: Vault coverage
Jamboards are now covered by Google Vault - more to come on this.
Meet: Live Captioning
You never forget your first live captioning moment (though English only at this point). Simply enable "live captions" and you will see an instant translation of the spoken words in your Meet.
Meet: Recording*
It may seem like Meet has been able to record meetings forever, but the service was only added this year. With the consent of other participants, you can record the entire Meet session and store it in Google Drive. If the Meet was part of a Calendar event, it will even get attached and distributed for you.
Meet: Live Streaming*
Meet is now able to stream to over 100.000 internal users. These users will be passive and see a YouTube-like interface, perfect for big town hall meetings.
Meet: 250 users
It may be just a number, but Meet now supports up to 250 active participants. Meetings bigger than this should use Live Streaming).
*These services have not been enabled in a few territories. If you can't find the service, please reach out to your territory service manager.
Why is this important?
Why is this important?
Many of you will be sick of hearing about ongoing change, how you need to update your skills, how you better hurry to retrain to be a data-sprouting caretaker for elderly robots in 5 years time. Yet this is precisely why we are paying for Google, for super-specialized technologists whose families long stopped trying to understand what they're doing and a world-class change team nobody knows how few they really are because of how effective they are:
Google Workspace is a conveyor belt of innovation.
Google Workspace is a conveyor belt of innovation.
Yes, it stutters from time to time. Yes, it had better deliver sort by color ASAP. (edit: DONE.) But then again, I don't know any mature software that delivered that many features per year - every year. Without having to install, you know, Google 2019 Enterprise Edition on all your servers and on all laptops over Christmas, and please retest everything and oh, license costs will be slightly adjusted.
For you as an organization, Google Workspace means huge bragging rights (not just at job fairs: "Dude, I mean sir, what do you mean by 'I will not have to use Outlook?'"). It accelerates change and creates acceptance for an ever-evolving world that other programs latch onto.
Back to what it means to you - it means you had to learn how to record Meets last year and that Calendar works slightly differently. It means you now have a new social network. It means Gmail serves you better than ever. Did your world come crashing down? Probably not if we did our job right. Did it hurt? Not really, right? (That Change team...).
So what it should mean to you is: The features don't matter. This is not about the tool. This is about the team (your team), and this is about the right way of facing the future - eyes open, proactive and confident. You could keep up with all this change, so you have no reason to fear the future. This is why PwC uses Google.
Gender insensitivities aside - Star Wars quote is inserted, my job is done.
I told you 2019 would be awesome - and it was! We are getting ready for an even better 2020 (edit: body, did I know), I hope you are as fired up as I am. Here is to a brilliant year in technology and at PwC, wherever you are. Thank you for reading!
#strategyPublished 2020-01-07 by Holger Matthies.Modified 2020-12-10 by Holger Matthies.Written listening to clearly too much upbeat music, like Richard Durand - The Air I Breathe (Extended Mix)
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