2022 in review

Calendar

Adding attachments to calendar events
You can now attach Miro, LucidChart items etc., alongside Google Drive events. All securely, in the cloud, without losing control and sending legacy attachments around.

External booking pages
"Can you send me your times to meet?" has been solved for Google Calendar users. Also known as the Calendly killer.

Suggest "Attending virtually" or "Attending from a meeting room" based on your working location
Working location is a BIG deal for facility management and team cohesion. Many, many smarts (like this one) are starting to flow from it.

More forcefully nudging people to set "working location"
Working location is now enabled by default rather than enabling it - but you still have to decide where you are. Companies get an option to "remind" people to enable working location. The more people use it, the better. Enable yours today!

Color categorization ❤ Work Insights
Calendar permits you to rename your colors/categories, and will let you analyse how you spend your time by category.

Chat

Rich text editing
Chat used to permit only *this* kind of formatting, now it supports colors and most things text editors do, in a user-friendly way.

See when people delete chat messages
In flat rooms, inline replies are tied to the original message and get hidden when it is deleted. To create more transparency, it's now replaced with a "This message was deleted" text.

Managers
Chat spaces can now have "managers". Those are people who can delete the entire space and change certain settings. They will likely be the equivalent of Google Currents' community owners when Currents joins Chat.

Classic Hangouts was upgraded to Chat
Hooray! Most companies have made the switch to Chat already, but some struggled. It was fully migrated in November. This means that Google can free up resources and even more people can help making Chat awesome.

Unified search experience
Chat was born with no search experience at all, just a conversation lookup. Now, the search bar searches for conversations and messages and auto-completes like you expect it to. Many people still have a hard time searching, but it has evolved at an amazing pace.

Space descriptions and guidelines
Space managers can now set guidelines and descriptions (where you rename a space). This can hold house rules, links to the community site, helpful documents etc.

Discoverable spaces
Chat spaces can now be made discoverable! This changed everything, making Chat the true successor to Currents and our new social fiber.

Calendar statuses synched with Chat
If you have an out-of-office event or are in the middle of focus time, Chat will now automatically adjust your status message (unless you have set your own). Normal events will also show you as "in a meeting".

iOS integration for Focus Time
Google does not control iOS, but is hard at work to improve your experience. You can now control which Gmail and Chat notifications you receive when iOS is in Focus Time.

Delete chat spaces
You no longer have to dance around difficult situations and ask people to leave or ignore a space - space managers can now delete it.

Bigger spaces
All spaces can now host 8.000 people. That's a lot of chatter. Of course, this is in preparation for Currents joining Chat.

Smart replies in Spanish, French, Portuguese
Smart replies are those one-liners it suggests. They are expanding - language is a layer.

Data Loss Prevention
Like other Google Services, Chat can now scan content against corporate policies. No third-party software required, works across desktop, mobile, you name it.

Inline threading, a.k.a. Slack replies
Some people have wanted Slack for years, others have disliked "threaded" rooms. Yet others wanted a WhatsApp-style "quoting" mechanism to refer to individual messages. You all now got inline threading, where you can spin up side conversations to reply to any message in the conversation flow of flat rooms.

AI summaries
So many conversations, so little time? Let the AI handle it for you. Chat will now create personalized summaries of what went on in each room, each thread, so that when you come back, you can only read the summary. You can decide whether to leave it at that or whether the content warrants reading the entire thread.

Scheduled Do-not-disturb
In time for the holidays, you will be able to set the start time of DND. (You could always set the end time.)

Drive

Client-side encryption
Google is addressing digital sovereignty requirements - one part is data sovereignty, which goes further than building local data centers. Client-side encryption means your company holds the encryption keys, so nobody else (not Google, not the company running the data center, not the government) can access your data without your consent.

Transition from multiple file locations to shortcuts
My Drive used to be a complicated place: Files could be in multiple places, or none at all. Shared Drives greatly simplified things and My Drive has been evolving to become like Shared Drives (not the other way around). Making it less complex and more like a traditional file system will make it more user friendly and enable new functionality, like a column to indicate a file's parent folder.

Expiring access controls
You can now give view, comment or edit rights for a certain number of days. It's built-in compliance.

Trust rules
Administrators can now define who can share with whom, down to the person. This enables separating two divisions inside your company and flexible sharing policies.

Localized Shared Drives
Just like My Drive, data in Shared Drives can now be associated with data regions, another key data sovereignty requirement.

Docs

Textual watermarks
If you want to write "confidential" all over the page, now you can.

Pageless documents
Why does "serious" text have to resemble a page, if serious spreadsheets or serious websites do not? The most impactful Docs change (for me) this year.

AI summaries
Google will now read, understand and summarize your document for you. There are 100 reasons to do it.

Email draft templates
You can now draft emails collaboratively (even save them as deliverables) before sending them, right from Google Docs.

Grammarly killer
Grammarly still does 1 or 2 things very well, but it also gets a copy of every document you open, page you visit and keystroke you type. For most other features, such as tone of voice, passive voice etc., you now want to use Google Docs.

The universal @ menu overflows with functionality
You can now add tables, customizable dropdown chips, Google maps, emojis (always important) and much more.

Sheets

Doubling the cell limit
Each Sheet now supports 10 million cells.

Smart chips coming to Sheets
Chips for people, files and calendar events have proven so popular that they are making their way to more services.

Timeline view
Sheets has a native Gantt chart that can be used for projects, tasks, hospital and server maintenance schedules - you name it.

Meet

Live translated captions
Meet can now translate spoken English to French, German, Portuguese and Spanish. More languages are coming.

Meet hardware devices get lots of love
During the pandemic, nobody went to the office, so conferencing devices didn't get used. That is over - Google has updated the conferencing experience to be on par with the web. This includes hand raising, Q&A, camera improvements, noise reduction, breakout rooms and much more.

Webex interoperability
Google and Cisco hardware now support each other's calls.

Join Meet in a side panel (Docs, Sheets, Slides, Jamboard)
You can now add your ongoing Meet session to a side panel. When your coworkers do the same, you can work and talk at the same time instead of watching one person present their screen.

Better Calendar integration for co-hosts
You can scale a Meet from a 1:1 to 100.000 web conference. But if you want to set up a call in advance, you can now configure all features in advance, including naming co-hosts.

Banning participants
When removing isn't enough. Make sure they can't come back - no Zoom-bombing here.

Guest list from Calendar
Meet's people panel displays the invitees, how they responded, their working location or out-of-office status. My personal favorite Meet release!

Anonymous polling and Q&A
If the host allows it, people do not have to give their names before using these interactive tools.

Call control for USB peripheral devices
Do you know those "Works with MS Teams" stickers on Logitech headsets? They all work on Meet now.

Autoframing
If you sit far away from your camera, Meet can adjust your image so that others see you well-centered.

Mute and unmute yourself using the spacebar
No more leaving the microphone on during big calls with this walkie talkie function.

Other noteworthy improvements

Contacts: Share profile links
Contacts introduced absolute URLs (previously, the addresses were valid only for you, like Gmail).

Forms: Full styling
You used to be stuck with 4-5 templates. Now, you can customize every aspect of Google Forms to your (and your brand's) liking.

Gmail: Email, Chat, Spaces and Meet - all in one view
Google finalizes their vision and unify collaboration clients in one. You can still use Chat in a standalone client, of course.

Slides: Present directly in Meet
When you present your screen, you can now control it from within Meet. No need to switch back to Slides to click "next".

That was a lot, but there are certain things missing: Deploying new software to your machine. Downtime. Fat clients. Compatibility testing with existing applications and mandatory updates to third-party software. "Sorry, your machine does not support version 2022". 

The future is secure, AI first and cloud-only. The future will happen here first. Thank you for working together, for engaging, subscribing, and for reading! We're ready for 2023.

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