At the end of September Google Apps for Work celebrated 10 years and has decided to change its name to G Suite. In addition to this rebranding, Google announced a series of enhancements and new functionalities for G Suite, which includes applications such as Drive, Docs, Calendar or Hangouts.
Let us walk you through a short list of the most interesting new functionalities that help the teams to work much more effectively in a collaborative as well as in an individual way.
Quick Access
This new feature called Quick Access in Drive will take 50% off the average time it takes to get to the right file, by eliminating the need to search for it. Instead, machine learning will predict which file you need before you type and then display those near the top of the screen. The technology is able to make a smart guess about the file you might need based on things like your Drive activity, as well as your interaction with colleagues and your workday patterns like recurring team meetings or regular reviews of forecasting spreadsheets.
Action Items
According to research by the McKinsey Institute, employees spend about 20 percent of their work week searching for details internally and asking questions to colleagues. This happens especially when a document is full of ideas, requests and comments, making it difficult to get a clear sense of who’s responsible for what.
When writing in a document "Andreea will arrange a meeting with supplier X" will be suggested adding an action / task (the same way you add comments and suggestions) to be assigned to the right person who will receive an email notification.
Smart Forms
This functionality will ease a lot the work of those using questionnaires in their daily activity. Since their launch in 2008, and until now, Google says they made over a billion questions, which allowed them to identify certain patterns / templates and a mechanism for matching certain responses by type of question. In the case of multiple choice questions, it can now come up with smart answers proposals according to a formulated question, which may decrease the time of drafting a questionnaire by 25%.
We have been using the suite for a few years already and we can say that with G Suite we have all the tools necessary to conduct our business effectively and to keep our customers and colleagues satisfied.
