Your workplace Google Chat groups are about to get a lot bigger thanks to a new upgrade to the platform.
Google says that it is upgrading its chat software in order to “boost communication and collaboration for teams of all sizes”, as going forward, up to 8,000 members can now be added to a Google Chat space, a huge increase from the current limit of 400.
The company says the change will be ideal for including everyone in an organization into a central group for the quick delivery of vital messages, but if we're honest, we're more worried about the constant ping of chat notifications.
Google Chat spaces
“We hope this update will increase connectivity and create broader communities for your organizations,” Google wrote in a Workspace Updates blog post (opens in new tab) announcing the news.
The change, which will be available for all Google Workspace customers, as well as legacy G Suite Basic and Business customers, won't require any admin changes to enable, but will only be applicable to newly created spaces for Chat-preferred domains – although Chat-only domains will see it for all new and existing spaces.
The change will not be available to Google Hangouts users following the recent announcement of the software's official end of life being announced (opens in new tab) as the company looks to modernize its Google Workspace suite to be as effective for users as possible.
The upgrade follows a pledge earlier this year by Google Workspace to help improve communication and collaboration for all kinds of teams.
This included making video meetings more secure and interactive, with the latter point covering features ranging from in-meeting reactions to picture-in-picture video.
Users are also now able to start a Google Meet call (opens in new tab) directly from their Docs, Sheets or Slides file, with calls also now including polls, Q&As, and automatic noise cancellation across many different kinds of hardware.
Google Chat also recently introduced a new feature that allows users to create group chats (known as Spaces) within the platform (opens in new tab) that can then be shared with others in your organization. The company says this will be particularly useful for creating and sharing “topic-based conversations” within your business, such as team discussions, how-to guides and mentoring opportunities.
English
Arabic
Belarusian
Bengali
Bosnian
Bulgarian
Chinese (Simplified)
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
Estonian
Filipino
Finnish
French
Georgian
German
Greek
Gujarati
Hausa
Hebrew
Hindi
Hmong
Hungarian
Igbo
Indonesian
Italian
Japanese
Javanese
Kazakh
Korean
Kurdish (Kurmanji)
Kyrgyz
Lao
Latvian
Lithuanian
Macedonian
Malagasy
Norwegian
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Punjabi
Romanian
Russian
Serbian
Slovak
Slovenian
Spanish
Swedish
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian
Vietnamese
Yoruba