After the arrival of the era of working from home, Zoom quickly became the leader of video conferencing platforms. But other giants are not willing to fall behind and have added more and more powerful functions to their meeting tools.
This is true for Google Meet. Meet has launched a lot of new features over the past year. If you've only noticed layout changes recently, you might need this guide to understand all the new features and how to use them.
[Related: Google's new Green Room feature allows you to prepare for video conferencing]
While all users can use Meet, most of the changes over the past few months have occurred in Google Workspace, Google's Enterprise Professional Suite. If you're using a free base account, you may have to wait to get these new features - if the tech giant decides to make it available to nonpaid users.
Zoom-like tile view was launched on Google Meet last year, but the platform built a cleaner version. Users can now get a dark background and be able to unfix their own video feed in the tile view and view themselves in a floating window.
The control panel has also changed. The red hang-up button is now on the right, while the buttons to turn on and off audio and video are on the far left. This change is designed to prevent you from accidentally exiting the call when the manager asks you a question instead of unmute it.
Google began launching the new Meet look in May and will continue to launch in June. When this feature is applied to your company's Google Workspace account, you will see a banner before the call announcing the latest layout. Here you can also find a link that gives you the opportunity to go back to the old version of the experience—the old version of the Meet interface—until a certain date. However, once that date comes, you can't return again.
Starting in September 2020, Google has begun to launch various tools to help improve the efficiency of work meetings during the epidemic.
It first introduced the whiteboard feature, the only new activity tool available to users with a free Google account. It uses the company's little-known and often underrated Jam platform. This is equivalent to having a big blackboard in the conference room to write down ideas or even doodle them. To activate it, click the Activity button (a triangle, a square and a circle) in the lower right corner, go to Whiteboard, and then click to launch a new whiteboard .
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Jam file will open in a new window and can be seen by anyone in the meeting. After the call is over, the file will be automatically saved to the host's Google Drive, which can be accessed by all participants. If you attend a follow-up meeting, you can open the existing Jam file and continue from where it was last interrupted. To do this, click after clicking on the whiteboard and select from Drive.
Voting and Q&A work similarly, this time using Google Sheets. Both tools are very easy to understand: the first allows the host to vote on the audience, whether or not the real-time results are displayed; the second allows attendees to ask questions in an interface similar to Google Docs comments. The moderator has the right to review the questions before they appear publicly, and participants can only see them after approval. Like the real message board, other participants can vote on the query and can even be deleted by the original poster.
After the call is over, both tools generate a Google Sheets file containing the results and records of each question raised during the meeting, accessible to all attendees.
When hosting a meeting, click Vote under the Event button to understand your audience. There, everyone can also ask questions by clicking Q&A.
Lastly, if you have a lot of participants on the call, the breakout room is a useful tool. To use them, go to the Activities and select Broken Room. There, click Set a breakout room. A new window will appear where you can create up to 100 smaller groups and assign a different name to each group. You will also see a list of participants so that you can assign them to each group, but you can also click the Assign button to let Google Meet do this for you.
You can turn off the breakout room at any time, or set a timer to turn it off automatically. In either case, users receive a 30-second warning before everyone returns to the main meeting.
If the demo is not stressful enough to the audience, Google Meet once asked everyone to search their files through its platform. Now every user with a Google account can bypass this hassle and click the demo shortcut button directly from the tab where the file is opened.
You will see this option next to the Share button in the upper right corner of the screen, which looks like an icon with an upward arrow rectangle. When you click on it, if it is in your Google Calendar, you will see the meeting name. If not, you can always manually enter the meeting code under Use the meeting code demo.
[Related: How to put video calls on TV]
If you don't know the code, you can find it by clicking the Information button in the lower right corner of the call tab and copy the PIN under Join Information.
Google Meet links can last a long time after the scheduled date, but this will not happen again. Now, whether you have a paid account or a free account, the Meet link has an expiration date, but that expiration date depends on the planning platform the host uses to create the meeting.
If you use Google Calendar to generate a link, the code will expire within 365 days of the last use and will only work if it is not linked to a future or recurring event. If you use another platform (such as Gmail, Hangouts, or Meet homepage), the meeting code will expire one year after the last person opens it.
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