With Google Meet all globally distributed teams can still reliably meet face to face.
Google Cloud 3rd March 2020 preceding epidemic consequences
Events transform the working environment, empower through exchange of knowledge and benefit both personal and industry’s growth. Due to covid-19 all events in the physical world have been immediately cancelled while the unintended consequence being that events themselves transformed Google Meet product dramatically over a period of two months only!
Large organisations have been implementing and benefiting from Google’s Intelligent Apps, including Google Meet (former Hangouts Meet) for their internationally spread branches for quite awhile.
Now the time has come in one way or another for the rest of the world to discover the power of virtual meetings by implementing Google Meet to transform events on schedule for work of for distance education. Besides the well known among end users Zoom and Skype, Google Meet has been recently boosted with more features from the Google Meet Product Team. Since I started using Hangouts Meet with my G Suite Enterprise account in November 2018 there have been more than 20 major releases in a raw.
Google Meet Recent Releases
Here is an unexhausted list:
- Assign Meeting Privileges, update rolled out on the 19th of March 2020
- Live Captions. Turning Live Captions “On” makes it possible for participants who can’t hear for any reason to read the words of the speaker.
- Dial in Hangouts Meet with an international phone number. This is a mobile user friendly opportunity to join video conferencing.
- Material design Visual improvements.
- Use of Hangouts Meet with Internet Explorer 11
- Hangouts Meet has One setting in Admin Console
- Meet Quality Tool, including visual timeline to evidence start of the video call, participants, devices, who shared screen and for how long, who left the meeting, microphone activity, video and audio quality data and codes of the video call.
- Use a phone for audio in Hangouts Meet
- Emergency rolled out Hangouts Meet improvements for remote learning in support of teachers online classes.
- Secure connections for protected video-conferencing
- Google Meet Security. With Google Meet, schools can take advantage of the same secure-by-design infrastructure, built-in protection, and global network that Google uses to secure your information and safeguard your privacy. For more details, see Meet security and privacy and edu.google.com/privacy.
- Open Gmail and hit the Meet button! Keep up talking face to face to your colleagues while getting the work done remotely or complete your educational classes.Start or join a Google Meet video meeting directly from Gmail
- 16 participants are on the screen at the same time with Tiled layout. Change screen layouts in a meeting.
- Presenting a Chrome tab shares that tab’s audio by default. https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2020/04/high-quality-video-audio-meet.html
- Google Meet Now Available for Free to everyone
- Google Essentials
- Noise Filtering Availability differs for products and countries.
- To check all updates, visit “What’s new in Google Meet” in Google Meet Help
Change is constant in Google Meet. To catch up check What’s new in Google Meet.
Google Meet video-conferencing capabilities
with all G Suite editions are including:
Meetings for up to 250 participants per call
Live streaming for up to 100,000 viewers within a domain
The ability to record meetings and save them to Google Drive
In support of educational and work processes hampered by COVID-19 Google has enabled at no additional costs these features until September 30 2020.
The quoted functionalities of Google’s productivity apps are normally costing G Suite Enterprise editions EUR 23 per licence.
Google Meet All
All users are on tough schedule during turbulent covid-19 times therefore Google is adding its premium feature for secure business meetings to every personal account. Users can start Meets directly from Gmail or from Google Calendar for free from their personal Google Accounts.
Google Meet “How To”
The best place to start with Google’s video-conferencing is the G Suite Learning center.
- Learning Center and included in it
- Google Meet Cheat Sheet
Easily follow from the Pins on this Board
- Join Meet from meet.google.com
- Join Meet from Gmail
- Join Meet on mobile, nothing to download
- Join Meet from an email invite
- call in Meet from your phone
- Create Calendar Events adding Meet video conference
- Chat in Meet
- Present in Meet
- Change layout
Tons of Google Meet Love
Edit 17th February 2021. Online classes integrated Google Meet out of neccessity yet a year later Google Meet has embraced the teaching process!
The Google Meet team has been listening to the pain points of teachers in online classes across the globe: https://support.google.com/meet/community
The announced new features coming in Meet are setting a high goal: making Google Meet the desired classroom community tool.
Google Meet Enable Recording
- Subscribe to G Suite. Choose edition.
- Login your Admin Console and go to G Suite apps on your left panel
- Open Hangouts and click “Mee settings” to turn recording “On”. It is set to “Off” by default.
How to Join an Online Meeting
Google Meet Assign Meeting Privileges
With a Google update rolled out on the 19th of March G Suite Administrators can use permissions on domain based Organisational Units to enable control in Google Meet that is education-wise for the character of the online meetings.
Selected organisational units that contain faculty and staff and Classroom Teachers Groups receive meeting privileges.
Google Hangouts Meet Meeting Privileges
Teachers, educators, online meeting owners ( event hosts and organisers) can:
- prevent participants from re-joining a meeting
- mute or remove other participants in a meeting
- stop participants from sharing their screen
- on a computer can end the meeting for everyone on a video call
- stop participants from sending chat messages. ;participants will still be able to read the messages.
Beyond Google Meet Technicalities. How to Benefit From Events?
Nearly everyone is engaged with events now, from authors launching books, students in education, activists promoting causes in global and local socially engaged initiatives, expert conferences, online webinars and live streamed events to just participating in any event friends are inviting you. Being a volunteer at Insight Seminars, I’ve observed people addicted to the transformational power of events to an extend where unintentionally their whole life turns into events only. A situation similar to meetings only experience at work. How to benefit from events while avoid distraction?
Events Expand Expertise
Choose carefully the topics of your interest! The chances to be distracted when you already have your own professional expertise are potentially minimal. On E Board Home series is a best Use Case of an online event, expanding participant’s expertise.
I have my own experience with events transformational power. In the beginning of my professional transition from international commerce industry to consultancy in digital brand communications I joined:
- Thought leadership niche such as SEO
- International environment such as Google’s global platforms and products, Google Product Experts Program events.
By its nature the transformational process you get involved with events is ultimately a personal growth process. Give time for the learning from events to become an awareness of a persisting interest and passion.
How to Stamp Digitally
As soon as you have focused on the events of your interest, explore the best practices for evidencing the online activity across channels. Engagement online is expected to increase 10 times on mobile devices therefore attending events either organising events is a must for PR and Brand reputation purposes. Event’s digital footprint is equally important. Ironically best practices start with a minus or in other words with data discrepancy. Below are the most frequent mistakes I recapped from 5 years of research and personal experience with live stream and online events.
Mastering Events Digital Footprint Excludes:
- single format
- ignoring relevance between roles and data
- public relations clichee
Users online are in fact a standalone audience different than participants in the event’s physical hall either the Google Meet or other virtual room. For a digital footprint implement best content strategies, learn from from Google’s Search resources.
Google Trends for Meet
Data source: Google Trends (https://www.google.com/trends)
How to progress with Google Meet?
- Subscribe to my constantly updated playlist “Meet” from Google resources.
- Visit Google Meet Help Center and Community
- Subscribe to On E Board Home series and Tutorials created through extensive weekly Hangout Meet practice.
- Follow #OnEBoard on Twitter and bookmark On E Board
Read the related Weekly Update – March 7, 2020: Coronavirus-related Policies, Hangouts Meet Premium, Pixel Feature Drop (Peggy K.)
October 2020 Update: Google Meet is now part of Google Workspace
Disclaimer: Google and the Google owned logos are registered trademarks of Google LLC, used with permission
