Google Chat webinar

Download a copy of the slides from Using Google Chat and Spaces to optimise team communication.

• Google Chat and Spaces Digital Office webinar slides 2024

This is a Digital Office webinar offered by the Enterprise Applications Group in UCD IT Services. The topic of this session is Google Chat and Spaces, and using these tools to optimise team communication for UCD staff.  So the agenda is a little bit about the Digital Office initiative, then a description of Google Chat and Spaces, what these are. We'll look at the settings for Chat in general and Spaces for group communication. We'll look at how to create a Space, how to use the Space, and some added features like using tasks within a Space. 

So to start, a bit about the Digital Office, this is an initiative from UCD IT Services, and this webinar is offered as part of that initiative. And it gives a toolkit of resources to help you complete common online or hybrid office tasks. All of the resources are based around three themes, time management and calendaring, collaborating and communication, and file storage and sharing. So today's session is very much about collaboration and communication. We have a website at ucd.ie/digital office. And we also have a community on Google Chat, a Digital Office community, which all UCD staff are very welcome to join. The links to both of these resources are below. 

So going into our topic for today, what is Google Chat? So it's an instant messaging service offered by Google. It's integrated with the other Google Workspace products. So it's very easy to use chat within Gmail, within Google Drive. And it's a supported alternative at UCD to WhatsApp and other instant messaging services like, for example, Slack. So to kick off, I'm going to play a little video from Google that gives a whistle-stop tour of Chat and gives you a little taste of what it's about.  Okay, so that, I hope, gave a little bit of a flavour of Google Chat and what it can do. And it alluded there to some things like the security, for example. And this is within our supported applications at UCD. So if there was an issue, compared to something that's unsupported, UCD IT services can help if there are issues. 

So let's start off with a little bit about the navigation. For the most part I'm going to go live to Google Chat within our Google Workspace here at UCD. But you can refer back to these slides afterwards. And there are screenshots, there are videos, and there are links to everything that I'm going to be describing in today's webinar. Okay, so I guess before going live, just to say that Google Chat is an instant messaging service and you can directly message anybody here within the UCD staff. You can also add external people and message them directly. And it's a nice way to see, for example, if somebody is available to meet right now if they want to go for a coffee. And there are also Spaces, as I alluded to. So these Spaces are group chats and central places for teams to engage in discussions, share knowledge and ideas. And they can be useful for project communications and also for building team culture. And the nice thing, again, is that it's all integrated within the Google Workspace. It's all available there directly within your Gmail. 

I'm just going to go out of the slideshow now, and I'm going to go and see that there are a few ways to access Google Chat. So as I say, it's available to all UCD staff as part of the Google Workspace subscription. So the first way to access Google Chat is directly within your Gmail inbox. As I say, there's a little chat icon here on the left. And you can see straight away, and you'll get a little notification if somebody either messages you directly or adds you to a space. So that's one way to access Chat. The second way is within your Gmail, within Google Drive, any of the Google applications, you'll see this little waffle icon up on the top right. So if you click this and select it, you will see that you can open chat in a standalone window. So as you'll see here, there is, again, it's the same interface. It's just helpful. Some people find it very useful to have it all within the one tab that you can see within your Gmail. Other people prefer to have it separately, so you are able to switch it off within your email and have it as, you know, a separate tab. And then the third way to access Chat, and again, this is up to yourself, is you can download an app on your desktop. There's a standalone app that you can download in Chrome. And similarly on your mobile phone, if you wish, you can download a Google Chat app and access Chat in that way. Okay, so for today's session, I'm going to use the chat that's available within a browser window. 

So as I said, there is a left navigation menu here, and you'll see at the top there are shortcuts. There's a little dropdown where you can expand or you can collapse any of these direct messages, which are one-on-one messages, and then there are Spaces which are down below. So we'll start here with these three.  Home is, you know, the first page that you come to, and it's a summary of everything that's been ongoing in Google chat. Mentions are places where somebody mentions you specifically, somebody's tagged to essentially in a post or in a message. And then Starred is similar to email in Gmail, if there's a message that you want to come back to, that you want to mark, you can star it within Google Chat, and then you come back to find them in a list.  The next option here, direct messages are one-on-one chats. So, you might ping somebody and see if they, you know, want to go for a coffee, if they're available to take a quick meeting. So you can see straight away here if somebody is available or not. For example, I'm here available on green, and the red would indicate that somebody is busy, and if it's white, then that somebody is out of office or not available at the moment. And it would also give you a little heads-up if you try to ping somebody and they are marked as out of office, so you will know straight away if they're out of office or not.

I think we would say that this is complementary. It's an additional channel to email. It wouldn't replace it completely. But it might be for if you want to ask somebody a quick question, whereas if something needed a more considered response or a longer record of it, you might send that through email. So it's a nice complementary medium. 

And then the third area here on the left is Spaces. And as I said, Spaces are this area for group collaboration. They're very useful either for your team, for example, if you wanted to have a place to boost collaboration, maybe pop in tips or tricks. You can share things like gifs, and you can react with emojis. So it's quite easy, I suppose, to interact with others, especially if you're working in a hybrid way. It can also be very useful for project communications, because rather than things getting lost in emails and you're trying to create folders, you can add everybody from the project group or the, you know, initiative group into a space here within Google Chat. And then all of the messages, all of the files, anything that's shared, they stay within this Space. And then you can come back and you can review it afterwards without having to trawl through tons of things. 

And an example here is I did a course myself at UCD on a UDL badge, and my group, we set up a group here within Google Chat, a Space, and we were able to talk through questions that we had. We were also able to share files so that we could provide feedback to one another. And now that that the project is finished, I can still come back and refer to this. It's a way to connect with my project group, and it's also a way to refer back to stuff without having to trawl back through email. So there's a couple of use cases, I suppose, for Spaces. 

You can also use it, of course, for something that's less formal - for an initiative or a group about a particular interest area. And again, if you wanted something to be kind of informal and that you wanted to engage people directly within their Google Chat. then looking at how you create a new chat, you would click New here, 'New Chat', and you have options here. You can either search for people, so search for people within UCD. You can go then and you can create a Space, so it's open to anybody at UCD to create a new Space, browse through existing Spaces, and you see people who have requested to message you directly. So if I click 'Browse Spaces' here, you can see that there are a whole lot of different Spaces, both from UCD and, I suppose, across the web as well. 

And you can filter those here by using the drop-downs. So you can select Internal and External. You can select Internal, so this would be specific to UCD, or External only, so there are some communities across the whole Google ecosystem. So that might be a nice introduction to Spaces if you haven't used them before. And you can search through Spaces as well that might be of interest. So that is Chat and Spaces. Before I go any further, I'm actually going to go through some of the Chat settings. So if you click the little cogwheel up here on the top right, you will see that the Settings bar is there. And there are various things that you can choose within this. One of the most important that I think is very good for work-life balance is you can set a Do Not Disturb schedule, which means that you won't get notifications at certain times. So, for example, here the default is between 7 pm and 7 am Monday to Friday, and then all day on Saturday and Sunday. You can customise it and you can create new Do Not Disturb schedules, depending on your working schedule. But it's a very nice feature that means you don't get disturbed by Chat messages outside of hours. 

And then there are some other optional features here. So there is, you know, Smart Compose, where Google will give some suggestions as you're typing out your message. Smart Reply, I suppose a step further is that when somebody sends you a message, it will populate a suggested Reply in Draft Mode, I should say. It doesn't actually send a reply to somebody. Just helping you to speed up your communication. AutoCorrect, if you're like me, and your typing isn't very good. And then there is a new feature as well to show a conversation summary. So again, that's an optional feature that you can enable or disable. All of these can be enabled or disabled simply by choosing the check mark here. And that's using AI or machine learning, as alluded to in the video there. it gives you a quick summary if you come into a Space and there's been a lot of traffic, a lot of messages, so you can see the summary there. So that's the Chat settings. And again, you can access those at any time via the cog wheel here. 

As I said, you can indicate your status on Chat up here if we look at the dropdown. I have it set automatic based on my chat activity. I'm green, I'm available. You can set a do not disturb, which will mute the chat notifications and people can see you're busy before they ping you. And you can set yourself as away, and as I say, if you shut down Chat, you'll also show yourself as away. So again, just a nice way to indicate maybe your availability if you have colleagues who need to ask you something, or alternatively if there's times that you really need some head down some space to work on something while you're concentrating. 

Okay, so I think the one-on-one chat is quite simple. You can click 'New chat' here, you can search for anybody. For example, I'll take myself here and select that person and then I'll select 'Start chat'. And this shows you, I'm just going to turn off these notifications here. So it shows you that the messages are back and forth. Again, similar to WhatsApp, similar to any instant messaging service. And as I said, if somebody is either will be out of office or is out of office, you will see a little notification before ever you send them a message. So again, it's just optimising that communication that you're not sending something that is not going to be seen by that person. So that's the direct messages. 

Again, here within the chat, there's a little formatting bar, if you look over here to the right-hand side, where, you know, it's limited in some ways, but you can add in hyperlinks and you can do some formatting options. you can respond by adding an emoji. You can send a GIF, and it's very informal. You can upload a file. You can also add a voice note. And we don't really use Google Meet. That's another option that you have there to start a meeting directly within Google Chat. And over here on the left-hand side, you'll see a + icon. And as I said, this is integrated very deeply with a lot of the other Google Workspace applications. You can add a Drive file, from your own Drive or a Shared Drive that are available to you. So you can share a Drive file very easily, or you can create a Calendar invitation. And then that calendar invitation is added to your calendar. If it's a direct thing with one other person, it adds you. Or if you're in a Space, which is a group chat, it will create a calendar invitation and it will invite everybody who is within that Space automatically. So again, just making life a little bit easier, making that communication and collaboration a little bit easier. So that's the direct messages. 

And I'm going to go down because most of what I wanted to talk about is about Spaces. And Spaces are very good, as we said, for group collaboration, for your unit, for a specific project, or your research collaboration. And I should say that we can invite external members to a Space within Google Chat as well. Alternatively, you can restrict it to only UCD staff members. So it's very customisable. So for this, I'm going to use some Spaces that I have created already. So I have a little demo Space, and I have the larger UCD Digital Office Community Space that I refer to. So as I said, this is open to all staff members at UCD. And it's open, and you're very welcome to join. And mainly me sending little tips and tricks, and sometimes people ask questions as well. 

So again, this demonstrates, I think, some of the features that I was talking about. As I say, it's been some time since I have opened. This has been some traffic in the meantime. So Google has suggested this conversation summary to help me catch up, which tells you that I've been talking about Nitro PDF Pro training, which is coming up. And as I said, this is an optional feature. It is AI powered. So you can choose whether or not to enable that in the Settings menu. But it can be a useful feature to catch up. So before going in, something that I wanted to point out is that there's a little three dots beside the Spaces here within the menu, and there are various options. So you can see here there's a little pin. I've pinned this Space, meaning that it's always at the top of the menu. And the way you do that is by clicking on the three dots. And there are options so you can mark something as unread. You can pin or unpin something so that it's up to the top. You can also mute it, meaning that you won't receive all the notifications if you don't want to. And you can leave or block a Space. So leave meaning that you don't want to be a member anymore and blocking that you won't see anything else from it. 

Then looking at something else at the rest of the settings, you'll see there are three tabs. So the first one is the main one. It's the chat. And again, it's a similar interface to what we looked at there. So you can send messages. You can format them. You can add your voice note or upload a file. And you can link to a Drive file and a Calendar invitation. And you'll see within a Space as well, you have the option to create a Google Doc, to create a Google Slide or create a Google Sheet. And when it's created within the Space, it's automatically shared with everybody. So everybody who is in the Space has access and it will also appear in this Shared tab. So as I said, it's a nice way to save project or initiative content because as well as all of the back-and-forth conversation, And this is automatically populated from anything that's shared within that group. And you can see who it's been shared by and the date that it was shared. So very handy.  There's also a nice feature that you can create and assign tasks to people, which is nice that you can add a task. You can give it a title and some details. You can add a due date and a due time and you can assign it to somebody. And very handily, as I said, this is integrated nicely with other Google services. So that, if you've added a date and a time, it will add a reminder into that person's, the assignee's calendar, so that they will get a little reminder at the time that that task is due. And then you can mark off tasks as done within the Space. So very handy.  Now I'm going to go up here and click on the dropdown arrow up at the top where the Space name is. And you will see this gives me a number of options. So some of them are the same. So you can mark something on the red, pin, or unpin the Space, meaning it's up at the top, mute it. And you can copy a link to the Space if you want to share it. You can also go into Space settings. So just to be aware here that a lot of the defaults are that everybody can do everything within a Space. And so if you are creating a new Space, we'd recommend that you restrict things like modifying the Space details to the Space managers only. And it's just a safer option because if somebody can modify the details, then that means that they can also inadvertently delete it. So the default is that everything is switched on for everybody. So if you are creating a Space, we would recommend that you just go through and customise this. 

As I say, there are different types of Space. So this is one is open to all of UCD, as I said it's set up so that Space managers only can manage members and groups. and then we have set it so that we haven't enabled external membership, as you'll see here. So something to be aware of here as well is that when you're creating the Space, you need to decide at the outset whether or not you're going to make it available to external members. So you can't do that after the fact. You have to do that when setting up the Space. And we'll look at that in a little minute. But just to note that you have the option to create it for UCD staff only or have it select the option for people outside of your organisation who can join. And another important note is that people outside of your organisation also includes students in this case, because the students are on a different Google domain to UCD staff. So that's the Space details. 

You can also go in and you can manage members. You can either add members directly or you can invite them, particularly if they are external users. You can also set some details for your space. So here we've set the description and some guidelines for the Space so that when people are logging in, they can see what the scope of it is. 

So then you might ask, that's the Digital Office Community. How do you go in and create a Space? So you go to 'New chat' again and 'Create a Space'. And as I said here, you can create a name and assign an emoji to the Space. And as I said, there's a couple of different types of Spaces. So first of all, is this for a collaboration where you can share and everybody can chat back and forth and share files? Or do you want to set this up as an announcement-only channel? out some information to students. Again, they all have a Google Workspace subscription. So it can be a nice additional channel if you want to communicate with them on multiple channels. Maybe you could set up an Announcement space, meaning that only you as the Space Managers can send announcements and information out if you don't want them to come back in. You have the access settings here, whether you want it to be private, so invited members only, which might be the case if it's for a specific project or your team. Or if you want to make it available to all of UCD. And then as I said, this option is here to allow external members to join or not. You just go through to New and 'Create a Space' up here on the top left. 

So we talked a little bit about the formatting, what you can do. You can share GIFs. You can upload files, which then appear in the shared tabs. Other nice features are you can respond to any post by adding a reaction. So if there's a large Space, for example, if it's a community and you want to have a little sub-conversation. So what you do is 'Reply in thread', and then that just responds to that conversation alone. And you can open it then over on the right-hand panel. So it means that if there's a conversation going on about a particular project and you have a question about one specific post or one specific element, it keeps that threaded or grouped together so that you can then go back and you can see it just within the history of this particular post.  And you also have the option to have Tasks and your Shared content. It's available to everybody across UCD, all staff and students, and it can be used in a number of different ways.  We talked today about how to access Chat so you can access it directly from your email, which is over here on the left-hand side. So you can see your shortcuts, your direct messages and your Spaces. You can click your waffle icon here within the Google interface and select chat. Or you can download the standalone app either for your desktop or for your mobile phone. And then that opens it in here and you can, as I say, deeply integrate it with a lot of other applications. 

With that, I'm going to go to our slideshow. There are links and some videos to everything that I described here. And last but not least, I will refer you on to some other resources: some UCD-specific resources. We have some articles. We have a service page on the website, the IT Services website, which has a lot of information. And we have a video as well - a short video about what we've discussed today. And we have some external resources that I'd recommend, in particular the Google Chat Cheat Sheet. The last article is when you could you use email, instant message and the phone, more of a general resource. That brings us to the end of today's session. Thank you for listening and all resources are linked below.