Google Workspace Community Roundup: March 2022

Lauren_vdv · 04-06-2022 03:44 PM

Welcome to our monthly Community Roundup series! Check out our latest news and upcoming events, along with new Community feature updates.

Change Management Methodology: The Journey to Long-Term Success with Google Workspace

Managing change isn’t easy, but it’s often necessary to improve and evolve - both as individuals and as organizations.

To help address the challenges around change management, the Google Workspace community came together to discuss effective change management methodologies and hear from customers how they’ve managed change in their organizations, particularly when it comes to hybrid work and adopting Google Workspace.

In this blog, we synthesize the discussion, focusing on Google’s change management methodology for Google Workspace, including the four key work streams necessary for managing change. If you're going through a change or looking to increase adoption of Google Workspace, this resource is for you!

Check out the blog

Have an impact on the future of Google Workspace

Did you know we have a Google Workspace Feature Ideas Exchange? and a Survey Insights Program? These are two ways you - as a Google Workspace customer - can have a direct impact on the products you use everyday.

Feature Ideas Exchange: A private area of the Google Workspace Community where customers under NDA can share and vote on ideas that make Google Workspace products even better. Product teams will review the top voted ideas, so voting is key!
Survey Insights Program: Share your ideas and feedback by participating in surveys about Google Workspace products. This goes a long way in helping our product teams enhance and improve our solutions to fit the needs of our customers.

Learn how to get access to the Feature Ideas Exchange and the Survey Insights Program here!

Join us for AppSheet Office Hours on April 14th

Join us for AppSheet Office Hours on April 14th at 11AM PT to discover new platform enhancements that greatly enhance app creation with the NEW Apps Script integration and BigQuery Connector enhancements coming soon.

The AppSheet team will demonstrate how you can natively call Google Apps Script functions within your AppSheet automation workflows, enabling your apps to tightly integrate with your own Apps Script code and over 30 Apps Script services with support for Google Drive, Sheets, Calendar, Gmail, and more.

We’ll also explain how you can use data from BigQuery with the BigQuery Connector, plus new enhancements coming soon.

As always, you’ll have the opportunity to ask any questions (even if they’re not directly related to the session topic) and receive answers live from AppSheet experts.

Pro tip: the best way to get your questions answered is by adding them in advance to the comments section of the event page here!

We want to hear from you! Community ranks and recognition feedback

We’re planning to refresh the Community rank structure, but before moving forward, we wanted to make sure we heard from you. This is after all, your Community so we want to prioritize your voice and perspective with any changes that are made.

Community ranks and badges can help serve a number of purposes, including:

Encourages and rewards quality contributions
Indicates level of engagement and expertise, which can help others know how to best respond and communicate with each other
Helps establish credibility and visibility as a leader
Brings an element of gamification that helps make Community fun!
We believe our current rank structure can be improved to better meet each of the purposes above. We have some ideas on how to do this, but we'd love to hear from you…

Please head on over to this post and share your thoughts! This will go a long way in helping us improve the experience for you and our global community of members 😊

Share your thoughts

The choice is yours: how to visualize community conversations

Did you know there are two different ways to visualize conversations in the Google Workspace Community?

By default, conversations follow a threaded format, which means that replies to the original post are not indented, and replies to replies are indented and live directly under the reply that they're in response to.

However, you can choose to change the way you see conversations to a linear format. Unlike the threaded format, replies in the linear format appear chronologically from top to bottom without any indentations.

Depending on how you prefer to visualize information or how you're used to reading forum conversations, you may want to use a threaded or a linear format. Threaded replies provide more context to the conversation, since it's easy to see which reply relates to which comment. One downside to the threaded format is that conversations are split into multiple subthreads, therefore dividing the conversation and potentially making it longer to locate the latest response in the entire conversation, for example.

If you'd like to change your view to be a linear format (rather than the community default, threaded format), simply follow the steps outlined in this support article here.

Top five contributors in March

We love to see how many of you are eager to participate in the Community's discussions. Let’s take a quick look at who contributed the most by replies authored and topics published in the month of March. Please meet our top five contributors:

Thank you @Jan-Carlos, @kim_nilsson, @StephenHind, @KAM, and @christiannewman!

Plus, our special shoutout for this month goes out to @gontranleynaert for sharing the most kudos this month. Thanks for showing your appreciation! 👍

Are you ready to become our next top contributor? Learn all about how to contribute to the Community here.

Top three conversations in March

Here are our most popular discussions in the Google Workspace Community over the past month:

Looking for more topics and discussions? Visit our Google Workspace forums and join the conversation or start something new.

Community feature updates in March

The Community team continues to work hard to improve the Community based on your valuable feedback. Here are some recent updates to our Community features:

1. Changing your username

When choosing a username in the community, it's important to know that the username you choose will be visible to the public. We suggest using your first name and last name initial, following this format: firstname_lastinitial (e.g. Andrew_B for Andrew Biernat).

We also recommend consistently using the same username, so all community members can easily recognize each other - thereby leading to a greater sense of community and belonging.

However, we understand that there can be certain reasons in which it's important to change your username, such as changes to your name or company, or privacy regarding your real name. So we've created a streamlined process to change your community username. To do so, complete this form and a member of the Google Cloud Community team will be in touch with next steps within 2-3 business days.

2. Relative dates are shown

To help quickly understand when a post was published, we've updated posts to display the relative date for anything posted within a month. Anything after a month will show the standard date format.

3. Mobile editor box size has increased

Finally, we've increased the size of the text editor box on mobile to help make it easier to keep the conversation going on the go!

We hope you enjoy our new feature updates and thank you to all our Community members who continue to make this space an engaging and informative place to be. If you have any feedback, please feel free to add your thoughts to the Community Feedback forum here or add a comment directly to this post.

Make sure you don't miss out on the latest Community news, activities, or opportunities by subscribing to News & Announcements. To do so, go to the News & Announcements page and click on the blue button that says "Subscribe." You can also learn more about how to manage your subscriptions and notifications in this article here.

Thanks everyone. Until next time!

The Google Cloud Community Team