What’s changing

You can now input addresses, instead of latitude and longitude coordinates, to enter the locations of your office buildings in the Admin console. This is a more efficient and reliable ways for you, as a G Suite admin, to manage international office locations.

Who’s impacted

Admins only

Why you’d use it

Adding address information immediately unlocks automatic correction of room and resource time zones based on building address. This ensures that you have correct data in the room insights dashboard. Additionally, with this change we’ll now automatically set the correct time zones for all resources in these buildings, and help ensure you see accurate usage by time of day in the room insights dashboard.

In the future, this information will also power other intelligent features such as:

• Automatic time zone adjustment when you’re working from other buildings
• Accurate directions from Calendar
• Room suggestions in nearby buildings

How to get started

Admins: There are three ways to input this information:

1. Directly from the Admin console user interface: In the Admin console under Manage Resources > Manage Buildings, you can enter addresses directly and be shown a Google map to confirm their location. This is recommended for entering a small number of buildings at a time. 
2. Bulk upload via CSV file: This is also in the Admin console under Manage Resources > Manage Buildings. The bulk upload spreadsheet supports a general address format, so you can verify your locations in many countries and regions. 
3. Upload via the Building Resources API. 

End users: No end user impact.

Source: G Suite Updates Blog

We want to help organizations make the best use of their space. To do that, we’re consolidating all features related to managing buildings and resources in a single dedicated place in the Admin console. We’re also introducing two new tools, room release and room insights, to help you understand your organization’s resource utilization and optimize occupancy.

A single destination for building and resource management
All features related to managing buildings and rooms are now united in a new and more prominent entry point in the Admin console called “Buildings and resources.” You can access this directly from the home screen or via Directory > Buildings and Resources in the navigation menu.



Room release based on event declines
According to an internal study, up to 40% of rooms are booked but go unused. To help your users reclaim those unused rooms, we’ll now automatically free up meeting rooms when all but one of the guests has declined the Google Calendar invitation. When the room is released, the event organizer will receive an email informing them of the change and suggesting that they reschedule or delete the meeting.



You can enable this feature for structured rooms in the Admin console by navigating to your resources and selecting the rooms you wish to enable for room releases. You then need to click "EDIT" and turn Calendar-based room releases on for your selection.



Please note, room release is only available for G Suite Business, Enterprise, Enterprise for Education, and Education editions and can only be enabled for structured rooms that are categorized as “CONFERENCE_ROOM.”

Room insights dashboard
We’re also adding a new dashboard in the Admin console for room insights. Here, you can see data such as:

• The most and least frequently booked rooms
• The usage and bookage rates of rooms across time zones and various room sizes
• How many rooms could be freed up automatically with Calendar’s room release feature

You can filter this data by building, floor, room, room capacity, room features, or time period for more granularity.



With these reports, you can make better decisions about improvements to your workspace. They provide signals on where to investigate further. Some examples of insights include:

• What are your most popular rooms?
• Are your rooms under-utilized or over-utilized?
• Which room sizes are most popular?
• Which equipments drive room usage? Which A/V equipment should you invest more into?
• When are the best times to schedule repairs and maintenance work?
• At which times are rooms most booked, and can you educate members of your organization to shift the times when they schedule meetings?

You can access this dashboard in the Admin console in the “Buildings & resources” section.

With this launch, we’re also adding a new admin privilege, “room insights,” to grant other admins or your dedicated facilities managers the right to only view this dashboard and other resources.

Please note, this data is only available for structured resources.

Launch Details
Release track:
Both features launching to both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release

Editions:

• Room insights: available to all G Suite editions
• Room release: available to G Suite Business, Enterprise, Enterprise for Education, and Education editions only

Rollout pace:
Full rollout (1–3 days for feature visibility)

Impact:
Admins and end users

Action:
Admin action suggested/FYI

More Information
Structuring resources

• Help Center: Set up buildings, features, and other resources
• Help Center: Switch to structured resources
• Help Center: Impact of using structured resources
• Detailed Guide: Structuring Google Calendar Resources

Room release

• Help Center: Release unused rooms

Room insights

• Help Center: See how meeting rooms are used

Launch release calendar
Launch detail categories
Get these product update alerts by email
Subscribe to the RSS feed of these updates

Source: G Suite Updates Blog