Google Spaces are now less restrictive and more discoverable within your organization…sort of

A new update to Google Spaces is allowing you or anyone in your organization to share a space via a simple link…sort of. More specifically, you can create spaces that are shareable, and anyone inside of your organization can join with that link (everyone outside of your company will still be unable to join, even if they have a link!). Unfortunately, any spaces you’ve already created are not yet able to be shared this way, which is a bummer.

Similar to how Google updated Spaces to include the ability to add external people and even when it created “unthreaded” chats, none of these updates are applicable to spaces you’ve already created, and it’s becoming frustrating, in my opinion.

My complaints aside, you will be able to click the drop down on the space name to “Copy link to this space” before sharing it anywhere you wish in order to invite new people to view its contents and communicate freely. Again, anyone you share this link with will need to join via their company email address (same organization).

Expanding on that, spaces can also be created to encompass your entire organization instead of just those who are invited (Surprise! This is also not available for existing spaces…). This means that everyone who works for you can stumble upon new and interesting spaces on their own and join them. You may be asking why you’d want to do this if spaces are meant to be intranet-style social settings where only those who need to be a part of the conversation for a project are, but Google states that some use cases are as follows:

• 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. 

I’ve never thought to use Spaces in these ways, but it’s awesome to see some examples coming from their creator. Essentially, Google wants to make it easier to broadly share information, build communities and “foster discussion”.

Anyone on a Rapid Release or Scheduled Release domain with a Google Workspace account as well as anyone with a legacy G Suite Basic or Business license can benefit from this update once it rolls out sometime over the next two weeks and potentially a bit longer. I’d truly be interested in hearing how you and your teams are using Google Chat spaces – I’ve fallen in love with them, but I need more ideas.