Google will allow users to create spaces in Google Chat that they can share with others in their organisation to join via link.
Users can update the access to a space to everyone in an organisation when creating a new space. They can copy a link to share with others.
However, users must note that they can only enable a space to be shareable within an organisation at creation. “At this time, users cannot enable discovery for existing spaces and share them via link,” Google said in a blog post. Further, users outside of their organisation will not be able to join such a space, even with the shared link.
“With this launch, Spaces are no longer restricted to only people added to the conversation. This update allows for the creation of topic-based conversations that can be shared more broadly within an organisation,” the tech giant said.
This can be particularly useful for spaces that are oriented around “sharing knowledge widely with others, including team discussions, how-to guides and mentoring opportunities, organisational and policy updates, situations where you need to quickly gather interested folks or those with relevant expertise, for example to investigate an outage, and cultural and social topics of interest, like reading, sports, or cooking,” it added.
The feature will be available to all Google Workspace customers, as well as legacy G Suite Basic and Business customers.
Google Meet attendance reports
Separately, Google Meet attendance reports are available now for education meetings with two or more participants.
Google Workspace Education Plus and the Teaching and Learning Upgrade users will now automatically receive an attendance report anytime a meeting has two or more participants. Previously, attendance tracking was limited to meetings with five or more participants.
Attendance reports will include information such as participant’s name, participant’s email, overall length of time a participant was on the call, including when they joined and exited.