Tag Archives: Hangouts Meet

Recurring Calendar meetings will migrate to Hangouts Meet video calling

What’s changing

As part of the migration from classic Hangouts to Hangouts Meet that we announced last year, we’ll now begin migrating the video conferencing for your recurring Calendar events from classic Hangouts to Meet. Previously, we made the change so that new events scheduled in Calendar will use Meet. Now this change is to update previously scheduled events in Calendar as well.

Who’s impacted

End users

Why we’re migrating

We've built Hangouts Meet to have a fast, simple interface with enterprise grade meeting functionality such as livestreaming and meeting with up to 100 people. To ensure you get the best-in-class experience we’re migrating the remainder of your existing recurring Calendar events. This will happen gradually in an effort to limit any disruption and ensure that you can focus on what’s important: meetings where people can be as productive as they are when they’re face-to-face.

How to get started


  • Admins: No action needed.
  • End users: When you join a recurring Calendar event on classic Hangouts, you will see a banner that future occurrences of this meeting will be on Meet.

Additional details

Migrating existing Calendar events
This change will take place gradually as users join affected meetings. They will see a migration banner notifying them future occurrences will be on Meet. After the end of the call, all participants will get an updated event information with the new meeting details. Single instance (non-recurring) Calendar events will remain unchanged.

If your meeting doesn’t migrate
Some of your meetings may not automatically update to Meet. When this happens, you’ll see a banner in the video call notifying end users to update the Calendar event to Meet. This may happen for complex Calendar event setups, such as if different events have the same video link.

Helpful links

Help Center: Migration FAQs

Availability

Rollout details

  • Rapid Release domains: Extended rollout (potentially longer than 15 days for feature visibility) starting on March 11, 2019
  • Scheduled Release domains: Extended rollout (potentially longer than 15 days for feature visibility) starting on March 25, 2019

G Suite editions
Available to all G Suite editions

On/off by default?
This setting will be ON by default.

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Dedicated Hangouts Meet IP addresses

What’s changing

We’re adding a range of official, fixed IP addresses to be used exclusively for classic Hangouts and Hangouts Meet in G Suite domains. That means that you can identify video conference traffic used in G Suite and deprioritize Hangouts traffic from consumer accounts. This can help you better configure and optimize network and firewall access.

Who’s impacted

Admins and network operators only

Why you’d use it

Hangouts Meet IP addresses allow you to recognize the G Suite video conference traffic. Use the IPs to:

  • Open Meet’s TCP and UDP ports for Meet IPs
  • Avoid tunneling or DPI for Meet IPs
  • Reduce latency by providing the shortest path possible to the internet for Meet traffic

How to get started



Additional information

Hangouts Meet and classic Hangouts will stop using the old IP address on February 14, 2019. As this change might interfere with previous network optimization you might have set up, we recommend adopting these IP addresses as part of your firewall and network configuration.

Helpful links


Availability

Rollout details

  • Rapid Release domains: Full rollout (1–3 days for feature visibility) starting on February 14, 2019
  • Scheduled Release domains: Full rollout (1–3 days for feature visibility) starting on February 14, 2019

G Suite editions
Available to all G Suite editions

On/off by default?
This feature will be ON by default.

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Two new Hangouts Meet tools added to the Admin console

What’s changing

We’re launching two new features in the Admin console to help G Suite admins better understand and manage the usage of Hangouts Meet within their organizations. Specifically, we’re adding:

  • Meet quality tool: This tool gives quick and easy access to meeting information in your domain. With that information, you can better understand what happened in a meeting and what might have caused quality issues, significantly reducing troubleshooting time.

  • Hangouts Meet activity logs: Information about Meet usage and quality is now available to admins through Meet activity logs (in the Admin console under Reports > Audit > Hangouts Meet), enabling you both high level and detailed views on usage within your domain.

Who’s impacted

Admins only

Why you’d use it

Meet quality tool: Meet quality tool is designed to help you to troubleshoot your meetings. You can either look at one specific meeting or filter for a time frame, location, device or user. The data visible in Meet quality tool is available in the Hangouts Meet activity log (explained below) to enable further analysis.

Hangouts Meet activity logs: Each time a device or a user leaves a call, an "Activity event" that summarizes usage and quality is generated. The event includes information about the endpoint (such as device type, location, IP, identifier, or call rating), its usage (such as time sharing their video, screen sharing or audio) and network statistics (such as jitter, packet loss, or RTT). Learn more about the data available in the Help Center.


Hangouts Meet activity logs provides data to help better answer questions such as:
  • Is video conferencing transforming my organization (and if so, how)?
    • Which locations communicate actively and which locations are isolated?
    • How many minutes of video conference (VC) are run every day/week for different groups of people?
    • Does Meet help my organization work remotely?
    • Analyze Hangouts Meet Hardware usage. How does it change over time or location?
  • How is my network performing and what is the impact it has on video quality for my users?
    • How do users rate the quality of the calls on my domain? Does it vary over time or per location?
    • How much bandwidth does Meet use overall and at a specific location?

How to get started


  • Admins
    • Meet quality tool: To use Meet quality tool you need to be a super admin or have the correct delegated admin privilege. Follow the instructions in the Help Center to learn more about Meet quality tool access delegation.
    • Hangouts Meet activity log: Visit the Admin console and go to Reports > Audit > Hangouts Meet. Here, you can export the data to your favorite analytical tool (using the Activity API or BigQuery for G Suite Enterprise customers) to answer specific questions you may have.

Export the data using BigQuery


  • End users: No end user impact.

Helpful links
Help Center: Troubleshoot meeting quality
Help Center: Hangouts Meet audit log

Availability

Rollout details

  • Rapid Release domains: Full rollout (1-3 days) starting on January 22, 2019
  • Scheduled Release domains: Full rollout (1-3 days) starting on January 22, 2019
G Suite editions

  • Both the Meet quality tool and the Meet activity log are available to all G Suite editions.

On/off by default?

  • This feature will be ON by default.

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View Google Calendar attachments in Hangouts Meet

You can now view the attachments that were included in Google Calendar, directly from a Hangouts Meet meeting. Attachments are available on the web and the Meet mobile apps.


Clicking on the attachment will open the file in a new tab on the web. If you’re joining the meeting through the Meet mobile app, the attachment will open on the app best suited to that document (Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Drive, etc).

Launch Details
Release track:
Launching to both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release

Editions:
Available to all G Suite editions

Rollout pace:
Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility)

Impact:
All end users

Action:
Change management suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center: Add attachments to your events

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Host Hangouts Meet meetings with up to 100 participants

Meeting with teammates, clients, or customers around the globe is critical to getting your job done. For those times when you need to meet with a larger group, Hangouts Meet now allows G Suite Enterprise users to organize meetings with up to 100 participants and G Suite Business users to host up to 50 participants. This participant count includes people from both inside and outside of your organization.



This new extended participant limit supports people joining from any mixture of video and dial-in entry points so you can flexibly bring together even more people from all over the world. It is now fully rolled out across all domains.

If you need to host an even larger meeting, you can enable live streaming, allowing up to 100,000 viewers to watch at once.

Launch Details
Release track:
Launching to both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release

Editions:

  • 100-person meetings available to G Suite Enterprise and G Suite Enterprise for Education editions only
  • 50-person meetings available to G Suite Business and G Suite for Education editions only
Rollout pace:
Full rollout (1–3 days for feature visibility)

Impact:
All end users

Action:
Change management suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center: Get Started with Meet
Help Center: Hangouts Meet Benefits and features
G Suite Learning Center: How many people can join a video meeting?

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Invite people to an ongoing Hangouts Meet meeting

We’re adding a new way to invite people to an ongoing meeting directly within Hangouts Meet. When you’re in a Meet meeting, you’ll now see an option to “Add people” at the top of the participant list.

Add people directly from the call

Clicking on this option will open a dialog box to send them an email invite to join as a full participant or call them into the meeting by phone.

To invite someone into your meeting, simply input their email address or lookup by name from the company directory.The invited participant will receive an email with instructions to join your meeting.

Enter the person's name, email address, or phone number

As always, inviting someone using their phone number will immediately call the phone number to to add them to the meeting. They will join as an audio only participant and will not see any video or the screenshare.

For more information on inviting people to Meet meetings, check out the Help Center.

Launch Details
Release track:
Launching to Rapid Release, with Scheduled Release coming in two weeks

Editions:
Available to all G Suite editions

Rollout pace:
Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility)

Impact:
All end users

Action:
Change management suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center: Invite people

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Hangouts Meet add-in for Microsoft Outlook available

We’ve built a Hangouts Meet add-in for Microsoft Outlook to help Outlook users schedule Meet meetings. This add-in allows you to create a new Meet video meeting in your Outlook event or email. Simply install the add-in, and tap on the Meet icon to automatically insert video conferencing details and info on how to join the Calendar event or email.



This add-in is the Meet equivalent to the previous Hangouts Outlook plugin.

Check out our Help Center to learn more about adding Meet video meetings to Outlook events, including instructions for downloading the add-in.

Launch Details
Release track:
Launching to both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release

Editions:
Available to all G Suite editions

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

Impact:
All end users

Action:
Change management suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center: Add Meet video meetings to Outlook events

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Live stream Hangouts Meet meetings

Many companies have important meetings that require delivering a message to large groups of people, like a company-wide all-hands or onboarding training. Now, G Suite Enterprise users can live stream Meet meetings to support these needs.

Meeting organizers in G Suite Enterprise domains can enable live streaming on their meeting in Calendar and invite their audience.



With the stream URL, up to 100,000 in-domain users can watch the meeting from the web or their mobile device. Support for watching live streams on Hangouts Meet hardware will be coming in the next few weeks. When ready, meeting participants can start the live stream to allow everyone to watch.





The ability to add live streaming to a meeting can be controlled per organizational unit (OU) from the Admin console. To do this, open the Admin console and go to Apps > G Suite > Google Hangouts and click “Meet settings.” Here, toggle “Let people stream their meetings.” This setting is ON by default.


For more information on live streaming video meetings, check out the Help Center.

Launch Details
Release track:

  • Admin console setting: Launching to both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release
  • End user setting: Launching to Rapid Release, with Scheduled Release coming in two weeks 


Editions:
Available to G Suite Enterprise and G Suite Enterprise for Education editions only. Free licenses are not eligible for meeting recordings or live streaming.

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

Impact:
Admins and end users

Action:
Change management suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center: Live stream a video meeting
Help Center: Enable live streaming

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Dial into Hangouts Meet from eight additional markets

In October 2017, we announced the rollout of international Hangouts Meet dial-in phone numbers for G Suite Enterprise domains. This option helps your team to stay connected, wherever they are. We’ve added this functionality for eight additional countries (with more to come!):

  • Argentina (AR)
  • Bulgaria (BG)
  • El Salvador (SV)
  • Georgia (GE)
  • Iceland (IS)
  • Malta (MT)
  • Slovenia (SI)
  • Thailand (TH)
For a complete list of currently supported countries, visit this Help Center article.

Launch Details
Release track:
Launching to both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release

Editions:
Available to G Suite Enterprise and Enterprise for Education editions only

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

Impact:
All end users

Action:
Change management suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center: Dial in from a phone
Help Center: Join a video meeting

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Ensuring your Hangouts Meet meeting rooms are always ready for the next meeting

We’ve enabled new features in Hangouts Meet to ensure your users always find their meeting rooms configured correctly and ready for their upcoming meetings. As an admin, you can now set a preferred mic, speaker and camera to use for all meeting rooms.

Going forward, if you’re using only qualified peripherals, the Hangouts Meet device will automatically reset back to the recommended configuration for microphone, speaker and camera between uses. If you’re using other peripherals or custom configurations, an alternative default configuration can also be configured in the Admin console.

To do this, open the Admin console, navigate to Device management > Google Meeting room hardware, and then find the specific unit whose default peripheral you’d like to change. Click on that unit, open the device health section, and click the desired device.



Launch Details
Release track:
Launching to both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release

Editions:
Available to all G Suite editions

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

Impact:
Admins only

Action:
Admin action suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center: Manage settings for Chrome devices for meetings

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