The same single, connected experience that helps millions of businesses, nonprofits and classrooms transform how they collaborate is now available to anyone with a Google account
Additional innovations designed for businesses include a new individual subscription offer, new enhancements to Google Meet, and new security and privacy capabilities to support trusted hybrid collaboration
Google today announced a series of updates that build upon its vision to deliver a single, integrated communication and collaboration solution to everyone via Google Workspace. Now, all of the company’s three billion-plus existing users across consumer, enterprise, and education have access to the full Google Workspace experience, including Gmail, Chat, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Meet and more.
In addition to offering Google Workspace to everyone, the company announced new innovations that address the specific challenges and opportunities of the hybrid work world:
- The evolution of Rooms in Google Chat to Spaces
- A new individual subscription offer: Google Workspace Individual
- New enhancements to Google Meet that enable collaboration equity
- New security and privacy capabilities across Google Workspace
“Collaboration doesn’t stop at the workplace — our products have been optimized for broad participation, sharing and helpfulness since the beginning,” said Javier Soltero, VP and GM, Google Workspace. “Our focus is on delivering consumers, workers, teachers and students alike an equitable approach to collaboration, while still providing flexibility that allows these different subsets of users to take their own approach to communication and collaboration.”
“Ensuring that workers have access to best of breed collaboration tools and information, regardless of location, is a top priority for every company, especially as they navigate a return to the physical office,” said Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst, Moor Insights & Strategy. “With this update, Google Workspace is creating a new competitive advantage by optimizing for a single, connected experience across its products that it is extending to consumers and individual business owners, to align with the experience that its enterprise and education subscribers benefit from today.”
Google Workspace for everyone
Every day, the world’s most innovative companies, schools and nonprofits use Google Workspace to transform how people work and achieve more together. It’s a daily part of how leading healthcare providers revolutionize patient care, schools turn remote learning into an immersive, personalized experience, and aerospace companies rethink flight. Starting today, Google Workspace is available to anyone with a Google account, meaning friends, family, or groups of any kind can stay connected, work together, and share helpful information in a single space. For example, you can organize a junior sports league with ease, take that fundraiser to the next level, or even turn a hobby into a business.
Starting today, users can enable the integrated experience in Google Workspace by turning on Google Chat in Gmail.
A new place to bring projects to life by connecting the right content, people, and conversations in new and powerful ways
With the introduction of Spaces, the Rooms experience in Google Chat will evolve into a dedicated place for organizing people, topics, and projects in Google Workspace. Over the summer, we’ll evolve Rooms to become Spaces and launch a streamlined and flexible user interface that helps teams and individuals stay on top of everything that’s important.
Powered by new features like in-line topic threading, presence indicators, custom statuses, expressive reactions, and a collapsible view, Spaces will seamlessly integrate with files and tasks, becoming a new home in Google Workspace for getting more done–together. Spaces will also provide a place to fuel knowledge sharing and community building for teams of all sizes, where all the relevant information, conversations, and files for a project can be organized, and where topics—even at the organization level—can be intelligently moderated. With the ability to pin messages where everyone can see them, Spaces will play a crucial role in helping people stay connected and informed.
