What’s changing
You can now create spaces in Google Chat that you can share with others in your organization to join via link.
Update a space's access to everyone in an organization when creating a new space
Who’s impacted
End users
Why it’s important
With this launch, Spaces are no longer restricted to only people added to the conversation. This update allows for the creation of topic-based conversations that can be shared more broadly within an organization. This can be particularly useful for spaces that are oriented around:
- Sharing knowledge widely with others, including team discussions, how-to guides and mentoring opportunities.
- Organizational and policy updates.
- Situations where you need to quickly gather interested folks or those with relevant expertise, for example to investigate an outage.
- Cultural and social topics of interest, like reading, sports, or cooking.
We hope this feature makes it easier to more broadly share information, build communities and foster discussion across your organization.
Additional details
Configuring a space to be shareable
Users can only enable a space to be shareable within an organization at creation. At this time, users cannot enable discovery for existing spaces and share them via link.
Access to a shareable space
Note that users outside of your organization will not be able to join such a space, even with the shared link.
Getting started
- Admins: There are currently no admin controls for this feature.
- End users: Visit the Help Center to learn more about creating spaces with different access levels.
Rollout pace
- Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains: Extended rollout (potentially longer than 15 days for feature visibility) starting on March 22, 2022.
Availability
- Available to all Google Workspace customers, as well as legacy G Suite Basic and Business customers
Resources
- Google Help: Create spaces with different access levels
- Google Workspace Admin Help: Optimize Chat spaces for your organization
- Google Help: About spaces and group conversations
- Google Workspace Updates Blog: Define and manage Chat Spaces, space descriptions, and guidelines with a new “manager” role
- Cloud Blog: Bridging the hybrid work gaps with Google Workspace