Tuesday, April 2, 2019

Transition your organization to use only Hangouts Meet for video calls

What’s changing

As part of the migration from classic Hangouts to Hangouts Meet that we announced last year, G Suite admins can now turn off classic Hangouts video calling for your organization. This means that all video calls in your organization will use Meet and any classic Hangouts video calls saved in Google Calendar will be removed.

Who’s impacted

Admins and end users

Why you’d use it

Enabling this setting expedites the transition of your organization to Hangouts Meet.

If you take no action, Calendar migration can continue to run and we'll automatically transition your organization to be Meet-only on our recommended schedule.

How to get started


  • Admins: Admins can turn off classic Hangouts video calling in the Admin console by:
    • Navigating to Apps > G Suite > Google Hangouts
    • Click Global settings
    • Next to Hangouts Meet, check All Meetings use Meet
    • Click Save
  • End users: No action required. If your admin decides to enable this setting, classic Hangout video calls will no longer be joinable. Please note, if you’d like to add Hangouts Meet video calls to replace removed classic Hangouts video calls, you must manually add one back into the Calendar event.

Additional details

When this option is turned on:

  • All video calls scheduled in Calendar will use Meet. This does not impact events scheduled by someone outside of your organization.
  • Any classic Hangouts video call URLs scheduled in Calendar will be hidden.
  • Classic Hangouts video calls scheduled within your organization will no longer be joinable and users will see an error message. Classic Hangouts video calls scheduled by someone outside of your organization will still be joinable.
  • You can use a custom meeting name to start an ad-hoc Meet call. Simply agree on a meeting name with all of the meeting participants and type it into the “Enter meeting code” field in Meet. Note that all participants must be in the same domain to use the name.

Please note, this change does not impact video calling from Hangouts Chat or classic Hangouts chat. This will continue to behave the same. Additionally, this change will not impact domains who do not have Meet turned on.

Admins should only enable this option if your organization is primarily on Meet with limited to no classic Hangout video calls scheduled in Calendar. You can check the usage stats for scheduled Calendar events using classic Hangouts video calling by using the Hangouts Meet audit log. To do so, query the number of calls containing a “Calendar Event Id” with “Product type” equal to classic Hangouts.

Finally, this setting is reversible. Unselecting this in the Admin console means that classic Hangouts video calls will again be shown in Calendar.


Helpful links

Help Center: Migration FAQs

Availability

Rollout details
Rapid Release domains and Scheduled Release domains: Admin console setting is currently available.

G Suite editions
Available to all G Suite editions

On/off by default?
This setting will be OFF by default for existing customers and ON by default for new customers

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