Tag Archives: G Suite

Access information quicker, do better work with Google Cloud Search

We all get sidetracked at work. We intend to be as efficient as possible, but inevitably, the “busyness” of business gets in the way through back-to-back meetings, unfinished docs or managing a rowdy inbox. To be more efficient, you need quick access to your information like relevant docs, important tasks and context for your meetings.

Sadly, according to a report by McKinsey, workers spend up to 20 percent of their time—an entire day each week—searching for and consolidating information across a number of tools. We made Google Cloud Search available to Enterprise and Business edition customers earlier this year so that teams can access important information quicker. Here are a few ways that Cloud Search can help you get the information you need to accomplish more throughout your day.

1. Search more intuitively, access information quicker

If you search for a doc, you’re probably not going to remember its exact name or where you saved it in Drive. Instead, you might remember who sent the doc to you or a specific piece of information it contains, like a statistic.

A few weeks ago, we launched a new, more intuitive way to search in Cloud Search using natural language processing (NLP) technology. Type questions in Cloud Search using everyday language, like “Documents shared with me by John?,” “What’s my agenda next Tuesday?,” or “What docs need my attention?” and it will track down useful information for you.
NLP GIF

2. Prioritize your to-dos, use spare time more wisely

With so much work to do, deciding what to focus on and what to leave for later isn’t always simple. A study by McKinsey reports that only nine percent of executives surveyed feel “very satisfied” with the way they allocate their time. We think technology, like Cloud Search, should help you with more than just finding what you’re looking for—it should help you stay focused on what’s important.

Imagine if your next meeting gets cancelled and you suddenly have an extra half hour to accomplish tasks. You can open the Cloud Search app to help you focus on what’s important. Powered by machine intelligence, Cloud Search proactively surfaces information that it believes is relevant to you and organizes it into simple cards that appear in the app throughout your workday. For example, it suggests documents or tasks based on which documents need your attention or upcoming meetings you have in Google Calendar.

3. Prepare for meetings, get more out of them

Employees spend a lot of time in meetings. According to a study in the UK by the Centre for Economics and Business, office workers spend an average of four hours per week in meetings. It’s even normal for us to join meetings unprepared. The same group surveyed feels like nearly half of the time (47%) spent in meetings is unproductive.

Thankfully, Cloud Search can help. It uses machine intelligence to organize and present information to set you up for success in a meeting. In addition to surfacing relevant docs, Cloud Search also surfaces information about meeting attendees from your corporate directory, and even includes links to relevant conversations from Gmail.

Start by going into Cloud Search to see info related to your next meeting. If you’re interested in looking at another meeting later in the day, just click on “Today’s meetings” and it will show you your agenda for the day. Next, select an event in your agenda (sourced from your Calendar) and Cloud Search will recommend information that’s relevant to that meeting.

GIF 2

Take back your time and focus on what’s important—open the Cloud Search app and get started today, or ask your IT administrator to enable it in your domain. You can also learn more about how Cloud Search can help your teams here.

Source: Google Cloud


Access information quicker, do better work with Google Cloud Search

We all get sidetracked at work. We intend to be as efficient as possible, but inevitably, the “busyness” of business gets in the way through back-to-back meetings, unfinished docs or managing a rowdy inbox. To be more efficient, you need quick access to your information like relevant docs, important tasks and context for your meetings.

Sadly, according to a report by McKinsey, workers spend up to 20 percent of their time—an entire day each week—searching for and consolidating information across a number of tools. We made Google Cloud Search available to Enterprise and Business edition customers earlier this year so that teams can access important information quicker. Here are a few ways that Cloud Search can help you get the information you need to accomplish more throughout your day.

1. Search more intuitively, access information quicker

If you search for a doc, you’re probably not going to remember its exact name or where you saved it in Drive. Instead, you might remember who sent the doc to you or a specific piece of information it contains, like a statistic.

A few weeks ago, we launched a new, more intuitive way to search in Cloud Search using natural language processing (NLP) technology. Type questions in Cloud Search using everyday language, like “Documents shared with me by John?,” “What’s my agenda next Tuesday?,” or “What docs need my attention?” and it will track down useful information for you.
NLP GIF

2. Prioritize your to-dos, use spare time more wisely

With so much work to do, deciding what to focus on and what to leave for later isn’t always simple. A study by McKinsey reports that only nine percent of executives surveyed feel “very satisfied” with the way they allocate their time. We think technology, like Cloud Search, should help you with more than just finding what you’re looking for—it should help you stay focused on what’s important.

Imagine if your next meeting gets cancelled and you suddenly have an extra half hour to accomplish tasks. You can open the Cloud Search app to help you focus on what’s important. Powered by machine intelligence, Cloud Search proactively surfaces information that it believes is relevant to you and organizes it into simple cards that appear in the app throughout your workday. For example, it suggests documents or tasks based on which documents need your attention or upcoming meetings you have in Google Calendar.

3. Prepare for meetings, get more out of them

Employees spend a lot of time in meetings. According to a study in the UK by the Centre for Economics and Business, office workers spend an average of four hours per week in meetings. It’s even normal for us to join meetings unprepared. The same group surveyed feels like nearly half of the time (47%) spent in meetings is unproductive.

Thankfully, Cloud Search can help. It uses machine intelligence to organize and present information to set you up for success in a meeting. In addition to surfacing relevant docs, Cloud Search also surfaces information about meeting attendees from your corporate directory, and even includes links to relevant conversations from Gmail.

Start by going into Cloud Search to see info related to your next meeting. If you’re interested in looking at another meeting later in the day, just click on “Today’s meetings” and it will show you your agenda for the day. Next, select an event in your agenda (sourced from your Calendar) and Cloud Search will recommend information that’s relevant to that meeting.

GIF 2

Take back your time and focus on what’s important—open the Cloud Search app and get started today, or ask your IT administrator to enable it in your domain. You can also learn more about how Cloud Search can help your teams here.

Generating Google Slides from images using Apps Script

Posted by Wesley Chun (@wescpy), Developer Advocate, G Suite

Today, we announced a collection of exciting new features in Google Slides—among these is support for Google Apps Script. Now you can use Apps Script for Slides to programmatically create and modify Slides, plus customize menus, dialog boxes and sidebars in the user interface.

Programming presentations with Apps Script

Presentations have come a long way—from casting hand shadows over fires in caves to advances in lighting technology (magic lanterns) to, eventually, (in)famous 35mm slide shows of your Uncle Bob's endless summer vacation. More recently, we have presentation software—like Slides—and developers have been able to write applications to create or update them. This is made even easier with the new Apps Script support for Google Slides. In the latest G Suite Dev Show episode, we demo this new service, walking you through a short example that automatically creates a slideshow from a collection of images.
To keep things simple, the chosen images are already available online, accessible by URL. For each image, a new (blank) slide is added then the image is inserted. The key to this script are two lines of JavaScript (given an existing presentation and a link to each image): 

var slide = presentation.appendSlide(SlidesApp.PredefinedLayout.BLANK);
var image = slide.insertImage(link);

The first line of code adds a new slide while the other inserts an image on the new slide. Both lines are repeated for each image in the collection. While this initial, rudimentary solution works, the slide presentation created doesn't exactly fit the bill. It turns out that adding a few more lines make the application much more useful. See the video for all the details.

Getting started 

To get started, check the documentation to learn more about Apps Scripts for Slides, or check out the Translate and Progress Bar sample Add-ons. If you want to dig deeper into the code sample from our video, take a look at the corresponding tutorial. And, if you love watching videos, check out our Apps Script video library or other G Suite Dev Show episodes. If you wish to build applications with Slides outside of the Apps Script environment and want to use your own development tools, you can do so with the Slides (REST) API—check out its documentation and video library.

With all these options, we look forward to seeing the applications you build with Google Slides!

Present like a pro: these new updates in Slides are designed to make you look good

As a go-to presentation tool, Google Slides already comes equipped with real-time collaboration features. Starting today, we’re introducing new robust features to help you and your team win that pitch, nail that client presentation and get buy-in for new ideas—all while saving valuable time.

Here’s a look at the latest updates in Slides, including new G Suite integrations, partner applications and customization options.

Capture ideas in Keep, bring them to life in Slides

We built Keep to help you easily capture and organize ideas. Today, you can use a new drag-and-drop integration between Keep and Slides to transform these ideas into action. Simply select notes from Keep (or sort with #labels) and drag them into Slides. When you add a note from Keep into your presentation, Slides will automatically add a title and description for you.

Keep and Slides GIF

The Office of Information Technology for the State of Colorado uses the new Keep and Slides integration to keep track of population numbers at different agencies and report them to their team. Instead of digging through emails and Docs to track down figures, the team saves statistics to Keep and drags them into Slides to present.

If you’re new to Keep, download here.

Related Article

8 tips to help you keep up in Google Keep

Google Keep makes organizing information a cinch. You can easily jot down ideas or share to-dos with co-workers. We asked Mario Anima, pr...

Read Article

Skip manual updates, use linked Slides

Whether you’re trying to prepare several client presentations or make sure data is up to date, repeatedly copying slides from one presentation to another is a major time-sink. Now, you can link and sync slides from multiple presentations with a click. This way, you can maintain a single source of truth and easily update linked slides to match the source, like for quarterly business reviews or company presentations.

Slides embedding GIF

Sriram Iyer, Senior Director of Product Management at Salesforce Sales Cloud, is excited to use the new slide embedding feature to streamline his teams workflows. Says Iyer, “At Salesforce, we use Google Slides for customer-facing and internal presentations. The linked slides feature will help us easily keep presentations up-to-date.”

You asked, we updated

Our customers also asked for additional features in Slides. We listened to those requests and now you can:

  • Insert Diagrams, or ready-to-use visualizations. This is great for when you need to effectively share timelines, processes or hierarchies.
  • Select Grid view to view all your slides at once as thumbnails. This helps you easily reorder or change formats of multiple slides.
  • Tailor presentations to different audiences with the Skip slide feature. You can now choose to skip select slides without fully deleting then when you present from your phone or laptop.

Try these feature upgrades and create better presentations.

Try new add-ons, shape up your Slides

We’re constantly improving Slides to provide you with robust tools to share ideas. Today, we’re bringing add-ons to Slides. To kick it off, we’re introducing seven  integrations—designed to bring expertise from companies like Adobe and Shutterstock—right in Slides.

Use these new, rich integrations to help you build more powerful presentations, whether you want to add full-bleed images, use advanced image editing tools or include diagrams you created in programs outside of G Suite.

  • Search for and add images from Adobe Stock, right in Slides. You can use the Adobe Stock add-on to build visually-stunning presentations in Slides. Teams can seamlessly search, preview and purchase Adobe Stock images—without leaving Slides. Through the add-on, teams can also use Adobe Stock Visual Search to find relevant stock images with an uploaded image (versus a text search).

Adobe still

  • Use the Shutterstock Editor add-on to add and customize photos within Slides. With the Shutterstock add-on, teams can browse Shutterstock’s entire library of royalty-free images, and sign into Shutterstock to license content, directly in Slides. Select an image, then apply customization options like filters, text, logos and more.

Shutterstock still

Teams can benefit from even more powerful capabilities in Slides with additional add-ons from Balsamiq, Lucidchart, Pear Deck, The Noun Project and Unsplash. Tap “Add-ons” in the Slides menu bar to get started.

Customize Slides, automate workflows with Apps Script

Apps Script, the same technology that powers add-ons, can transform the way you work. Apps Script for Slides lets your teams programmatically create and modify Slides, and customize the menus, dialog boxes and sidebars in the user interface.

So, what’s the big deal? Apps Script provides amazing possibilities for improving your team’s workflows. Sales teams can use Apps Script to automatically pull in information from Sheets’ databases to create customized client pitch decks and templates. Marketing teams can host internal assets in a customized sidebar in Slides for easy access to logos and files they use most often.

Learn how you can automate your workflows using Apps Script.


Present with confidence using Slides—these updates start rolling out to all customers globally on the web today.

Present like a pro: these new updates in Slides are designed to make you look good

As a go-to presentation tool, Google Slides already comes equipped with real-time collaboration features. Starting today, we’re introducing new robust features to help you and your team win that pitch, nail that client presentation and get buy-in for new ideas—all while saving valuable time.

Here’s a look at the latest updates in Slides, including new G Suite integrations, partner applications and customization options.

Capture ideas in Keep, bring them to life in Slides

We built Keep to help you easily capture and organize ideas. Today, you can use a new drag-and-drop integration between Keep and Slides to transform these ideas into action. Simply select notes from Keep (or sort with #labels) and drag them into Slides. When you add a note from Keep into your presentation, Slides will automatically add a title and description for you.

Keep and Slides GIF

The Office of Information Technology for the State of Colorado uses the new Keep and Slides integration to keep track of population numbers at different agencies and report them to their team. Instead of digging through emails and Docs to track down figures, the team saves statistics to Keep and drags them into Slides to present.

If you’re new to Keep, download here.

Related Article

8 tips to help you keep up in Google Keep

Google Keep makes organizing information a cinch. You can easily jot down ideas or share to-dos with co-workers. We asked Mario Anima, pr...

Read Article

Skip manual updates, use linked Slides

Whether you’re trying to prepare several client presentations or make sure data is up to date, repeatedly copying slides from one presentation to another is a major time-sink. Now, you can link and sync slides from multiple presentations with a click. This way, you can maintain a single source of truth and easily update linked slides to match the source, like for quarterly business reviews or company presentations.

Slides embedding GIF

Sriram Iyer, Senior Director of Product Management at Salesforce Sales Cloud, is excited to use the new slide embedding feature to streamline his teams workflows. Says Iyer, “At Salesforce, we use Google Slides for customer-facing and internal presentations. The linked slides feature will help us easily keep presentations up-to-date.”

You asked, we updated

Our customers also asked for additional features in Slides. We listened to those requests and now you can:

  • Insert Diagrams, or ready-to-use visualizations. This is great for when you need to effectively share timelines, processes or hierarchies.
  • Select Grid view to view all your slides at once as thumbnails. This helps you easily reorder or change formats of multiple slides.
  • Tailor presentations to different audiences with the Skip slide feature. You can now choose to skip select slides without fully deleting then when you present from your phone or laptop.

Try these feature upgrades and create better presentations.

Try new add-ons, shape up your Slides

We’re constantly improving Slides to provide you with robust tools to share ideas. Today, we’re bringing add-ons to Slides. To kick it off, we’re introducing seven  integrations—designed to bring expertise from companies like Adobe and Shutterstock—right in Slides.

Use these new, rich integrations to help you build more powerful presentations, whether you want to add full-bleed images, use advanced image editing tools or include diagrams you created in programs outside of G Suite.

  • Search for and add images from Adobe Stock, right in Slides. You can use the Adobe Stock add-on to build visually-stunning presentations in Slides. Teams can seamlessly search, preview and purchase Adobe Stock images—without leaving Slides. Through the add-on, teams can also use Adobe Stock Visual Search to find relevant stock images with an uploaded image (versus a text search).

Adobe still

  • Use the Shutterstock Editor add-on to add and customize photos within Slides. With the Shutterstock add-on, teams can browse Shutterstock’s entire library of royalty-free images, and sign into Shutterstock to license content, directly in Slides. Select an image, then apply customization options like filters, text, logos and more.

Shutterstock still

Teams can benefit from even more powerful capabilities in Slides with additional add-ons from Balsamiq, Lucidchart, Pear Deck, Noun Project and Unsplash. Tap “Add-ons” in the Slides menu bar to get started.

Customize Slides, automate workflows with Apps Script

Apps Script, the same technology that powers add-ons, can transform the way you work. Apps Script for Slides lets your teams programmatically create and modify Slides, and customize the menus, dialog boxes and sidebars in the user interface.

So, what’s the big deal? Apps Script provides amazing possibilities for improving your team’s workflows. Sales teams can use Apps Script to automatically pull in information from Sheets’ databases to create customized client pitch decks and templates. Marketing teams can host internal assets in a customized sidebar in Slides for easy access to logos and files they use most often.

Learn how you can automate your workflows using Apps Script.


Present with confidence using Slides—these updates start rolling out to all customers globally on the web today.

Source: Google Cloud


Monitoring the Apps Script issue tracker…with Apps Script

Originally posted by Paul McReynolds, Product Manager (@pauljmcr), Apps Script and Wesley Chun (@wescpy), Developer Advocate, G Suite on the G Suite Developers Blog

Apps Script is just as popular inside Google as it is among external users and developers. In fact, there are more than 70,000 weekly active scripts written by thousands of Googlers. One of our many uses for Apps Script at Google is to automate and monitor our internal issue tracker.

Your business depends on Apps Script...so does ours

In spring of this year, we migratedour G Suite issue trackers to a new system based on our internal tracker. This carries a lot of benefits, including improving our ability to track how issues reported from outside of Google relate to bugs and features we're working on internally. We also have an internal Apps Script API that talks to our issue tracker, which we can now use to work with issues reported from outside of Google.

As soon as the migration was finished, we put Apps Script to work monitoring…itself. Now we have a script in place that monitors Apps Script issues as they are reported and upvoted on the public tracker. When we see an issue that's having widespread or sudden impact, the script generates an alert that we can then investigate. With the help of our large, active community of developers, and leveraging Apps Script, we're now able to identify and respond to issues more quickly.

There's no substitute for independent monitoring, and our Apps Script-based approach isn't the first or the last line of defense. Instead, this new script helps us catch anything that our monitoring systems miss by listening to what developers are saying on the tracker.

If you see something, say something

Please help us keep Apps Script humming! When you notice a problem, search the issue trackerforit and file an issue if it's new. Click the star to let us know you're affected and leave a comment with instructions to reproduce, along with any other relevant details. Those instructions and other details help us respond to the issues more effectively, so please be sure to include them.

Happy scripting!

How Google went all in on video meetings (and you can, too)

Editor’s note: this is the first article in a five-part series on Google Hangouts.

I’ve worked at Google for more than a decade and have seen the company expand across geographies—including to Stockholm where I have worked from day one. My coworkers and I build video conferencing technology to help global teams work better together.

It’s sometimes easy to forget what life was like before face-to-face video conferencing (VC) at work, but we struggled with many of the same issues that other companies deal with—cobbled together communication technologies, dropped calls, expensive solutions. Here’s a look at how we transitioned Google to be a cloud video meeting-first company.

2004 - 2007: Life before Hangouts

In the mid-2000s, Google underwent explosive growth. We grew from nearly 3,000 employees to more than 17,000 across 40 offices globally. Historically, we relied on traditional conference phone bridging and email to communicate across time zones, but phone calls don’t exactly inspire creativity and tone gets lost in translation with email threads.

We realized that the technology we used didn’t mirror how our teams actually like to work together. If I want to sort out a problem or present an idea, I’d rather be face-to-face with my team, not waiting idly on a conference bridge line.

Google decided to go all in on video meetings. We outsourced proprietary video conferencing (VC) technology and outfitted large meeting rooms with these devices. 

If I need to sort out a problem or present an idea, I’d rather be face-to-face with my team, not waiting idly on a conference bridge line.
Hangouts 1

While revolutionary, this VC technology was extremely costly. Each unit could cost upwards of $50,000, and that did not include support, licensing and network maintenance fees. To complicate matters, the units were powered by complex, on-prem infrastructure and required several support technicians. By 2007, nearly 2,400 rooms were equipped with the technology.

Then we broke it.

The system was built to host meetings for team members in the office, but didn't cater to people on the go. As more and more Googlers used video meetings, we reached maximum capacity on the technology’s infrastructure and experienced frequent dropped calls and poor audio/visual (AV) quality. I even remember one of the VC bridges catching on fire! We had to make a change.

2008 - 2013: Taking matters into our own hands

In 2008, we built our own VC solution that could keep up with the rate at which we were growing. We scaled with software and moved meetings to the cloud.

Our earliest “Hangouts” prototype was Gmail Video Chat, a way to connect with contacts directly in Gmail. Hours after releasing the service to the public, it had hundreds of thousand of users.

Gmail voice and video chat
Hangouts 2

While a good start, we knew we couldn’t scale group video conferencing within Gmail. We built our second iteration, which tied meeting rooms to unique URLs. We introduced it to Googlers in 2009 and the product took off.

During this journey, we also built our own infrastructure (WebRTC) so we no longer had to rely on third-party audio and video components. Our internal IT team created our own VC hardware prototypes; we used  touchscreen computers and custom software with the first version of Hangouts and called it “Google Video Conferencing” (“GVC” for short).

First Google Video Conferencing Prototype | 2008

With each of these elements, we had now built our earliest version of Hangouts. After a few years of testing—and widespread adoption by Googlers—we made the platform available externally to customers in 2014 (“Chromebox for Meetings”). In the first two weeks, we sold more than 2,000 units. By the end of the year, every Google conference room and company device had access to VC.

2014 - today: Transforming how businesses do business

GIF test

Nearly a decade has passed since we built the first prototype. Face-to-face collaboration is ingrained in Google’s DNA now—more than 16,500 meetings rooms are VC-equipped at Google and our employees join Hangouts 240,000 times per day! That's equivalent to spending more than 10 years per day collaborating in video meetings. And, now, more than 3 million businesses are using Hangouts to transform how they work too.

We learned a lot about what it takes to successfully collaborate as a scaling business. If you’re looking to transition your meetings to the cloud with VC, here are a few things to keep in mind:

  1. Encourage video engagement from the start. Every good idea needs a champion. Be seen as an innovator by evangelizing video engagement in company meetings from the start. Your team will thank you for it.
  2. If you’re going to move to VC, make it available everywhere. We transformed our work culture to be video meeting-first because we made VC ubiquitous. Hangouts Meet brings you a consistent experience across web, mobile and conference rooms.  If you’re going to make the switch, go all in and make it accessible to everyone.
  3. Focus on the benefits. Video meetings can help distributed teams feel more engaged and help employees collaborate whenever, and wherever, inspiration strikes. This means you’ll have more diverse perspectives which makes for better quality output.

What’s next? Impactful additions and improvements to Hangouts Meet will be announced soon. All the while, we’re continuing to research how teams work together and how we can evolve VC technology to reflect that collaboration. For example, we’re experimenting with making scheduling easier for teams thanks to the @meet AI bot in the early adopter version of Hangouts Chat.

Related Article

Meet the new Hangouts

Last year, we talked about doubling down on our enterprise focus for Hangouts and our commitment to building communication tools focused ...

Read Article

How Google went all in on video meetings (and you can, too)

Editor’s note: this is the first article in a five-part series on Google Hangouts.

I’ve worked at Google for more than a decade and have seen the company expand across geographies—including to Stockholm where I have worked from day one. My coworkers and I build video conferencing technology to help global teams work better together.

It’s sometimes easy to forget what life was like before face-to-face video conferencing (VC) at work, but we struggled with many of the same issues that other companies deal with—cobbled together communication technologies, dropped calls, expensive solutions. Here’s a look at how we transitioned Google to be a cloud video meeting-first company.

2004 - 2007: Life before Hangouts

In the mid-2000s, Google underwent explosive growth. We grew from nearly 3,000 employees to more than 17,000 across 40 offices globally. Historically, we relied on traditional conference phone bridging and email to communicate across time zones, but phone calls don’t exactly inspire creativity and tone gets lost in translation with email threads.

We realized that the technology we used didn’t mirror how our teams actually like to work together. If I want to sort out a problem or present an idea, I’d rather be face-to-face with my team, not waiting idly on a conference bridge line.

Google decided to go all in on video meetings. We outsourced proprietary video conferencing (VC) technology and outfitted large meeting rooms with these devices. 

If I need to sort out a problem or present an idea, I’d rather be face-to-face with my team, not waiting idly on a conference bridge line.
Hangouts 1
A conference room in Google’s Zurich office in 2007 which had outsourced VC technology.

While revolutionary, this VC technology was extremely costly. Each unit could cost upwards of $50,000, and that did not include support, licensing and network maintenance fees. To complicate matters, the units were powered by complex, on-prem infrastructure and required several support technicians. By 2007, nearly 2,400 rooms were equipped with the technology.

Then we broke it.

The system was built to host meetings for team members in the office, but didn't cater to people on the go. As more and more Googlers used video meetings, we reached maximum capacity on the technology’s infrastructure and experienced frequent dropped calls and poor audio/visual (AV) quality. I even remember one of the VC bridges catching on fire! We had to make a change.

2008 - 2013: Taking matters into our own hands

In 2008, we built our own VC solution that could keep up with the rate at which we were growing. We scaled with software and moved meetings to the cloud.

Our earliest “Hangouts” prototype was Gmail Video Chat, a way to connect with contacts directly in Gmail. Hours after releasing the service to the public, it had hundreds of thousands of users.

Gmail voice and video chat

The earliest software prototype for video conferencing at Google, Gmail Video Chat.

Hangouts 2

Arthur van der Geer tests out the earliest prototype for Hangouts, go/meet. 

While a good start, we knew we couldn’t scale group video conferencing within Gmail. We built our second iteration, which tied meeting rooms to unique URLs. We introduced it to Googlers in 2009 and the product took off.

During this journey, we also built our own infrastructure (WebRTC) so we no longer had to rely on third-party audio and video components. Our internal IT team created our own VC hardware prototypes; we used  touchscreen computers and custom software with the first version of Hangouts and called it “Google Video Conferencing” (“GVC” for short).

First Google Video Conferencing Prototype | 2008

Google engineers test the first Google Video Conferencing hardware prototype in 2008.

With each of these elements, we had now built our earliest version of Hangouts. After a few years of testing—and widespread adoption by Googlers—we made the platform available externally to customers in 2014 (“Chromebox for Meetings”). In the first two weeks, we sold more than 2,000 units. By the end of the year, every Google conference room and company device had access to VC.

2014 - today: Transforming how businesses do business

GIF test

Nearly a decade has passed since we built the first prototype. Face-to-face collaboration is ingrained in Google’s DNA now—more than 16,500 meetings rooms are VC-equipped at Google and our employees join Hangouts 240,000 times per day! That's equivalent to spending more than 10 years per day collaborating in video meetings. And, now, more than 3 million businesses are using Hangouts to transform how they work too.

We learned a lot about what it takes to successfully collaborate as a scaling business. If you’re looking to transition your meetings to the cloud with VC, here are a few things to keep in mind:

  1. Encourage video engagement from the start. Every good idea needs a champion. Be seen as an innovator by evangelizing video engagement in company meetings from the start. Your team will thank you for it.
  2. If you’re going to move to VC, make it available everywhere. We transformed our work culture to be video meeting-first because we made VC ubiquitous. Hangouts Meet brings you a consistent experience across web, mobile and conference rooms.  If you’re going to make the switch, go all in and make it accessible to everyone.
  3. Focus on the benefits. Video meetings can help distributed teams feel more engaged and help employees collaborate whenever, and wherever, inspiration strikes. This means you’ll have more diverse perspectives which makes for better quality output.

What’s next? Impactful additions and improvements to Hangouts Meet will be announced soon. All the while, we’re continuing to research how teams work together and how we can evolve VC technology to reflect that collaboration. For example, we’re experimenting with making scheduling easier for teams thanks to the @meet AI bot in the early adopter version of Hangouts Chat.

Related Article

Meet the new Hangouts

Last year, we talked about doubling down on our enterprise focus for Hangouts and our commitment to building communication tools focused ...

Read Article

Source: Google Cloud


Monitoring the Apps Script issue tracker…with Apps Script

Posted by Paul McReynolds, Product Manager (@pauljmcr), Apps Script and Wesley Chun (@wescpy), Developer Advocate, G Suite

Apps Script is just as popular inside Google as it is among external users and developers. In fact, there are more than 70,000 weekly active scripts written by thousands of Googlers. One of our many uses for Apps Script at Google is to automate and monitor our internal issue tracker.

Your business depends on Apps Script...so does ours 

In spring of this year, we migrated our G Suite issue trackers to a new system based on our internal tracker. This carries a lot of benefits, including improving our ability to track how issues reported from outside of Google relate to bugs and features we’re working on internally. We also have an internal Apps Script API that talks to our issue tracker, which we can now use to work with issues reported from outside of Google.

As soon as the migration was finished, we put Apps Script to work monitoring…itself. Now we have a script in place that monitors Apps Script issues as they are reported and upvoted on the public tracker. When we see an issue that’s having widespread or sudden impact, the script generates an alert that we can then investigate. With the help of our large, active community of developers, and leveraging Apps Script, we’re now able to identify and respond to issues more quickly.

There’s no substitute for independent monitoring, and our Apps Script-based approach isn’t the first or the last line of defense. Instead, this new script helps us catch anything that our monitoring systems miss by listening to what developers are saying on the tracker.

If you see something, say something 

Please help us keep Apps Script humming! When you notice a problem, search the issue tracker for it and file an issue if it's new. Click the star to let us know you’re affected and leave a comment with instructions to reproduce, along with any other relevant details. Those instructions and other details help us respond to the issues more effectively, so please be sure to include them.

Happy scripting!

Search more intuitively using natural language processing in Google Cloud Search

Earlier this year, we launched Google Cloud Search, a new G Suite tool that uses machine learning to help organizations find and access information quickly.

Just like in Google Search, which lets you search queries in a natural, intuitive way, we want to make it easy for you to find information in the workplace using everyday language. According to Gartner research, by 2018, 30 percent or more of enterprise search queries will start with a "what," "who," "how" or "when.”*

Today, we’re making it possible to use natural language processing (NLP) technology in Cloud Search so you can track down information—like documents, presentations or meeting details—fast.

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Find information fast with Cloud Search

If you’re looking for a Google Doc, you’re more likely to remember who shared it with you than the exact name of a file. Now, you can use NLP technology, an intuitive way to search, to find information quickly in Cloud Search.

Type queries into Cloud Search using natural, everyday language. Ask questions like “Docs shared by Mary,” “Who’s Bob’s manager?” or “What docs need my attention?” and Cloud Search will show you answer cards with relevant information.

NLP Cloud Search GIF

Having access to information quicker can help you make better and faster decisions in the workplace. If your organization runs on G Suite Business or Enterprise edition, start using Cloud Search now. If you’re new to Cloud Search, learn more on our website or check out this video to see it in action.

Introducing Google Cloud Search

*Gartner, ‘Insight Engines’ Will Power Enterprise Search That is Natural, Total and Proactive, 09 December 2015, refreshed 05 April 2017