Google is bringing new updates to group conversations in Chat soon. The company has announced that it is making three changes to how group conversations work in Google Chat. Starting from December 3, Google Chat users will be able to see the changes that include the ability to add and change members in group conversations. The highlight of this new ability is that when a new member joins a group, he’ll be able to see the message in the group sent even before he joined. Also, other members in the group will see a message announcing the joining of a new member.
Another significant change is the compatibility of Chat with classic Hangouts. What it means is that the group conversations made in Hangouts will now appear in Google Chat in the coming weeks. This update is mainly brought to help transition from Hangouts to Google Chat smooth as the tech giant plans to shut down Hangouts next year. The third change highlights that the updated group conversations in Chat will also now follow the set Vault retention policy.
New Features, Working, and Availability
As per the official Google Blog, the three changes will come to Google Workspace from December 3 and will gradually roll out in 15 days for users. The compatibility of classic Hangouts with Google Chat will help automatically migrate the earlier Hangouts conversations and saved history. This, in turn, will help users smoothly transition from Hangouts to Chat in the first half of 2021. As said earlier, a significant change that is coming to Google Chat is the updated group conversations. Users can start/create a group conversation by using the “Start a new chat” option in the conversation settings menu.
The other change coming to Chat is about chat history. Admins will have the ability to control chat history for users in their organization, and end-users can also turn on/off chat history at the conversation level. Apart from this, another change is related to the Google Vault retention policy. With this change, the updated group conversations will also follow a different Vault retention policy. Note that the new Google Workspace is currently available for business customers only. Google will bring it to other users in 2021.
