U-M Google Updates

Starting May 21, 2018, Google will transition from Hangouts video meetings to Hangouts Meet. Meet provides significantly better performance over classic Hangouts video calls, with a cleaner, more focused user experience and a simple, secure, and reliable method for guests to join meetings. With Meet, participants can now use a standard telephone call to join a session.

With this transition, newly created Calendar events will contain Meet video meeting details. Previously created classic Hangouts video links will still be usable until August 13, 2018. For a full comparison of existing and coming features between classic Hangouts and Meet refer to this Help Center article.

Please note: There are many services under the Hangouts name, including Hangouts chat, Hangouts meet, and Google Hangouts. Hangouts Meet is the video meeting service that has become the standard in the Google portfolio.

U-M Google Mail is a convenient way to share files in Google Drive. If the email recipients do not have access to the linked files, you will get a message asking if you want to change the file’s sharing permissions. Until now, the default recommendation was to let anyone at the University of Michigan with the link view the file. To increase privacy, that default will soon change to recipients of this email can view the file. This share setting can still be changed from the default on each email. 

Google is continuously looking for ways to improve collaboration. One way is by adding new activity features to make it easier to see who updated a file and how.

Google Drive

Introducing Activity dashboard in Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides! It’s a feature that lets collaborators with edit access see who has viewed the file and when they viewed it. For example, a collaborator can check if a coworker has seen a file already and alert them that it’s been updated. Or an account manager can judge the best way to follow up with a partner, depending on whether that partner has viewed the materials they previously sent.

You may have noticed a notification in Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides to explain the feature and its control options. Activity dashboard will only show viewing data for a collaborator after they see this notification. It will not display any activity from before they saw it.

All collaborators will have access to privacy settings that allow them to control whether their views show up in Activity dashboard at any time. For more information and to change settings, see the Activity dashboard Help Center.

The monthly U-M Google Summaries inform campus of Google releases for Core Apps as well as the Non-Core Apps (those that are not part of the G Suite for Education agreement). We communicate important information on Core Apps throughout the month. Core and Non-Core Apps are listed on the G Suite website.

Core Apps

• Improving the menus in Google Docs editors
• Quick access for Docs now available
• Add a custom favicon in the new Google Sites
• Legacy Google Drive desktop sync client now shutting down on May 12th, 2018
• Find shared content with new file organization in Google Drive
• Improve collaboration in Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides with Activity dashboard
• Customize Your G Suite Experience With App Maker
• Inbox types now supported in the Gmail app for Android
• Warning message shown to iOS users who don’t have Hangouts Meet enabled

Previously Communicated

• Publish sites to a specific audience in the new Google Sites
• Spring Collaboration Services Training

Earlier this month we announced that the new Google Hangouts Chat would be rolling out on the UMICH domain. Since then, the ITS Infrastructure Collaboration Services team, ITS Accessibility experts, and the Collaboration Services Advisory Group at the University of Michigan have taken a detailed look at Hangouts Chat.

After thorough testing, these groups found that this current version of Google Hangouts Chat lacks many critical and essential features. The ITS Collaboration Services Team and the Collaboration Services Advisory Group recommend that the University of Michigan not activate Google Hangouts Chat until these gaps are addressed and the product matures. For more information, please read the Service Evaluation.

Google Hangouts remains available as it is a different app than Hangouts Chat.

We will keep you updated with new developments.