Big change from last week’s newsletter – Google Meet remains unlimited for everyone until March next year which is excellent news.
End users
Google Calendar: Tips to get the best out of your day. This article provides 4 tips on using Google Calendar to help your productivity. It’s ideal if you’re working remotely from colleagues, or trying to co-ordinate meetings with people in different time zones. Remember daylight savings means West Australians are now even ‘further behind’!
Noise Cancellation in Google Meet on mobile. If you’re a G Suite Enterprise customer (and not in Australia!) then you’re probably already enjoying the noise cancellation in Google Meet via the web interface. And now it’s coming to mobile, lucky you! For the rest of us – here’s a video of how noise cancellation works in Google Meet just so we know what we’re missing out on.
Google Meet tips and tricks – ok, so we might not have fancy noise cancellation but Google Meet is still a very useable and useful video conferencing option for small business owners. This article puts the most common ways to use Google Meet’s features in one handy article.
Gmail mistakenly removed the button that lets you triage loads of emails at once, but it’s coming back – ok, full confession: I had no idea there was a button that allowed you to remove loads of emails at once. If this is something you use often though and were wondering what happened to it, apparently there was a bit of a snafu and it got accidentally removed. Hopefully it comes back soon!
For Administrators
See which apps are Google verified in the Admin console – this is a great security update as now you can see whether apps are Google verified and make a decision as to whether to authorise them for use by staff or not.
Just for interest’s sake
Say goodbye to hold music – Google have announced a new feature that identifies when you’ve been placed on hold and allows Google Assistant to wait on the line for you. You’ll be alerted once a ‘real human’ comes on the line. It’s only available in the USA right now, and for owners of the most recent Pixel phones but it is an interesting idea from Google and one that personally I quite like.
5 hand signals for use in video meetings – this has nothing to do with G Suite or Google and is in fact aimed at teachers but I thought it has merit for those of us in large (49 attendees??) meetings. The exact meaning of the signals could of course change but offering people these options is a great idea I think.
That’s everything for this week – I hope you’ve found something useful here, whether you’re an end user or a G Suite administrator (or both!).