| 2023 IN REVIEW

We tracked 335 releases until now - every day, our service got better (Duet AI tells me there were 261 working days).

As is the tradition on this blog, we finish the year reviewing the biggest changes. Catch up on anything that you might have missed!

Big themes in 2023

Massive scale: Google Workspace is growing rapidly, with over 10 million companies now using it. To support this growth, Google is making its platform more scalable by allowing for larger meetings, more people in each space, and higher-quality video meetings.

Reducing redundancies: Google Workspace is a cost-effective platform because it has a smaller attack surface and requires less administration than other productivity suites. To maintain this efficiency, Google is constantly trimming and merging features. This year, Google Currents was merged into Chat, and Reminders were merged into Tasks. Next year, Google plans to merge the two types of chat spaces and sunset jamboards in favor of more tightly integrated alternatives.

Duet AI: 2023 was all about Duet AI, and 2024 will be as well. Sundar Pichai announced that the Gemini model is coming soon to Google Workspace. Gemini will be able to help users with a variety of tasks, such as generating text and images, summarizing content, and analyzing data.

Calendar

Calendar takes over tasks and merges reminders
For a long time, we have been puzzled by Google’s decision to maintain both Tasks and Reminders. The mystery has been solved: Google Tasks has been declared the victor and has absorbed Reminders. This massive undertaking (half a billion people rely on Calendar for their personal and professional lives) freed up resources to finally deliver …

Full-sized tasks view
A web-based solution for managing all your lists is finally here—no need for third-party apps.

Chat

Management capabilities for space managers
Space managers can now set policies for chat spaces, such as who can use @all or who can add members.

Announcement spaces
Spaces can now be created as announcement spaces, which allow only space managers to post. This type of space is perfect for very large spaces. Good thing spaces can be larger than ever.

Add groups to spaces
Groups are the best way to run projects - now, you can add your group to a chat space. Someone new joins the group, they’ll get added to the space.

Link to messages
Messages now have URLs that you can copy, store and share. It’s perfect for newsletters and referring to important posts.

New layout
If all those new functions don’t feel overwhelming, buried in menus, that’s because the interface has evolved over several iterations. Chat still feels easy, fast and fresh.

Add or remove space members in bulk
A new chatbot allows space managers to add large numbers of people via spreadsheets. 

Export email addresses of space members
You can now export the email addresses of space members, making it easier to add them to a group, for example.

Message view counts
See how many people read your message.

Up to 50,000 members
Spaces can now have up to 50,000 members, for even the largest organization - up from 8,000. That jump was necessary because Google Chat is exploding in popularity and new tools allow adding more people.

Searching members
What good is a large chat space if you don’t know who’s in it? You can now search even the largest spaces.

Focus time sets DND in Chat
If you create focus time in Google Calendar, it will mark you as “do not disturb” in Chat for true focus (optional).

Message quoting
Messages can now be quoted, like in WhatsApp, making it easier to respond to specific parts of a message.

Docs, Slides & Sheets

Docs: Custom building blocks
You can now save any loop component snippet for reuse. This gives rise to your very own template gallery.

Smart chip extravaganza
Smart chips are nicely-formatted links with pictures that reveal information and actions when you hover over them. They’re a huge success and were expanded to include finance chips for Sheets, rating chips, voting chips, a stopwatch, Google Maps, and YouTube.

Variable chips
When you build templates, you can now add blank chips to be replaced later, such as a generic people chip.

Co-present slides in Meet
When you present a Google Slide in Meet, you can now make others co-presenters. They can advance slides for you, read speaker notes and use other Slide tools for presenters without having to open the presentation.

Slides library
Templates in Slides used to be copies of a large template file. No longer - now, you insert perfectly branded slides from a panel.

Live pointers
People love the new generation whiteboard tools such as Miro and LucidChart. Live pointers make those tools magical. Slides now has them too.

Duet AI

General availability
2023 was the year when Duet AI launched, and work will never be the same again. Any sort of writing, researching, being creative or analytical has changed forever.

Drive

Move folders from My Drive to Shared Drives
My Drive is becoming more like Shared Drives and you can now finally move folders both ways.

Lock files
You can now prevent people from editing files by accident without revoking their editor privileges. Locking was possible with the powerful document approvals before - now it is available on its own.

Gmail

Mail merge with Google Sheets
Gmail now supports emailing thousands of people listed in a Sheets file. You can even use custom columns as variables in Gmail. Your end-of-year newsletters will be faster and more personal than ever.

Email your available time
You can now email others “your available times” so they can book it.

Meet

Reactions
Meet has eight reactions to express yourself without interrupting a meeting. They have discreet sounds and can accumulate into cute animations when enough people react in the same way.

Meet and Zoom can interoperate
Meet, Zoom and Webex have become BFFs (yes, one service is missing) and can interoperate extensively. This refers mainly to hardware: all these vendors sell equipment that can now dial into each other’s calls.

Custom organizational backgrounds
Your company can now make organizational backgrounds available for you. If you work in the same company as I, they certainly did and those backgrounds have become the most commonly used.

External label for participants
Google Workspace warns you when you include external participants in all services. Now, Meet does the same: An icon makes you aware when guests are present in your conversations, and marks who they are.

Full HD support
Chrome recently started supporting Full HD streams, so now Meet can too: Your recordings and live streams will also see higher resolution. You need to enable HD in your video settings.

Up to 1000 participants
Meet can now scale to 1,000 people. The more, the merrier!

Other noteworthy improvements

Contacts: Set and share your pronouns
Go to aboutme.google.com to set your pronouns (only works for corporate accounts).

Thanks for reviewing the biggest changes in Google Workspace in 2023 together. I hope you found it helpful. We're all looking forward to what 2024 brings for Google Workspace. Stay tuned, and subscribe to get the next post in January!

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