How Google Workspace helped businesses transform in 2022 : Overall Review

Since the inception of Digital Workplace offering from Google, currently known as Google Workspace, they have evolved immensely. In the last year, even with the pandemic and a lot of changes around the world, their feature rollout hasn’t stopped. Especially, after the rebranding last year from GSuite to Google Workspace, the collaborative features rolled out have increased by multiple folds. Google has focused heavily on collaboration, productivity and enabling employees in an organization to connect efficiently. 

Let’s look at some of the great Google Workspace features released in 2022:

  1. Unified View in Google Workspace: 

If you are a regular Gmail and other Google services user, you would have loved this update. Google has let everyone do much more from a single screen without having to leave the view. With the unified view, you can use Gmail, Chat, Calendars, Tasks, Docs and Meet all from the same screen.

It’s damn powerful and increases your focus. You could also customize the view based on your preferences to some extent. Google also introduced a lot of smart filtering options that are not only helpful but very fast and efficient. Spaces inside chats have also added the ability to hold targeted conversations within the organization as well as outside. Google chats also allow you to add up to 8000 members that make it super efficient. 

  1. Improvements to Google Meet: 

Google Workspace rolled out features like noise cancellation, portrait restore, portrait light and many more in the last year. These features help users to work at home or anywhere outside the office. Those places might have dim lighting or background noise. With the pandemic, many organizations have allowed employees to work from anywhere. Google has contributed to the ecosystem by bringing in these essential features. Enterprises with globally distributed employees could easily make the use of captions to read. They can understand messages in different languages. Automatic video framing lets you be placed correctly within the meet frame before joining the meeting. These features ultimately help you attend meetings from places with bad Wifi connectivity too. 

  1. Smart Canvas: 

Undoubtedly, the best feature Google rolled out in 2022 was the smart canvas. Their objective of not letting you switch between different windows is great. The overall efficiency of an employee is really improved with this simple idea. Smart canvas lets you connect everything with a straight forward mention of “@”. You can add tasks, mention people across those tasks to do effective team and task management.

You could also add meeting notes and attach it to a calendar event with a single click. Google also lets you create an email draft based on a predefined template and fill in the information. Later, you can get it transferred to a Gmail draft for easy sending. Developers get the flexibility to add code blocks into Google docs in simple formatted and indented manner. They really went ahead to add templates for product roadmaps and review trackers to help project managers. 

Ultimately, the time saved in building these templates as well as coordinating with colleagues is huge. The productivity addition is what organizations see when moving into Google Workspace. Digital collaboration should be simple and efficient. That’s what it is with Google Workspace.

Smart Canvas doesn’t stop there. You can search for places and tag Google Maps inside docs. You can mention files and reference them from your Google Drive without having to paste unpleasant hyperlinks. Google Sheets is also getting integrated with a timeline view to create easy Gantt charts within Sheets. It helps to add powerful dashboards for tracking projects. 

  1. AI Capabilities in Google Workspace:

Be it automated summaries in Google Chat spaces or smart replies in Gmail, Google Workspace has embedded AI capabilities to a great extent. The positive outcome to the addition is definitely increasing productivity and saving time. Do you really want to read through hundreds of messages within a Google Chat space? No, a simple summarized view is enough if it’s not directly related to you. Even reading big documents might not be efficient for executives. Google Workspace also introduced auto-generated summaries in Google Docs that will be sufficient for executives. It not only saves time but lets someone quickly skim the document and focus on what they need rather than trying to find it. Employees are always overloaded with a lot of information. Consuming it efficiently and effortlessly is one of the key drivers for every organization. 

Google Meet had an added feature to get automated transcript. It helps people who couldn’t join a meeting and still want the information. In the educational sector, it’s great for students to easily refer to conversations later. 

Well, the innovation doesn’t stop there. There are some exciting and disruptive features being rolled out in 202. We eagerly look forward to the same. In 2022, Google Workspace launched its offering for the public sector and have onboarded many Government agencies into their platform. One of the biggest public sector customers to jump on the bandwagon was the US Army. They have more than 250k active members. If the US Army trusts Google and sees the collaboration grow with them, why not you? 
If you have any questions related to Google Workspace services or need support before you want to adopt it for your organization, reach out to us today. We, at Cloudasta have served thousands of customers and have been in the business for a long time. Even if you are using an existing collaboration and Digital workplace platform, we help you transition seamlessly with our managed migration service. We have an in-house tool to migrate data into Google Workspace. Our team of experts can help you make the right decisions and clarify any concerns you might have.