As many businesses continue to hire younger employees, we are seeing the new generation bring in a new communication style, relying almost solely on social media platforms like Google+ to chat and communicate. In order to facilitate this, many companies have been integrating social networks, and in an effort to make Google+ that much more relevant to companies Google has recently introduced some interesting new business-relevant features.
In mid June, Google announced that they had implemented a number of new premium features for Google Apps users who use Google+. These so-named ‘Google+ premium features’, could prove to be just what businesses are looking for, especially when it comes to establishing internal social networks that are for your employees only.
About Google+ premium features
If your business uses Google Apps and Google+, and you are the admin for your business, you may have noticed an extra option in the past half year or so labeled premium features. These features were tested by select Google Apps users, and proved to be successful. So much so in fact that Google has announced that premium features are now turned on for all new Apps users, with existing users getting them by mid July at the latest.
The goal of these features is to enable a more customizable social media platform for businesses who may want to create and maintain a secure internal social network with users who can also join an external network or work group.
In a broad sense, these features influence two key aspects of Google+:
- Control options – With these features admins have greater control options over employee accounts. For example, you can set it so that all posts are shared only with your domain and made inaccessible to outside users. You can also set it so that certain employee profiles will not show up in public search results. Essentially, these features give you better ability to tailor how your business uses Google+, and the overall security of the network.
- Hangouts – The biggest boon this set of features offers is the ability to host larger hangouts and video calls – up to 15 users on the same call (instead of the normal 10). Users can also initiate or join a Hangout right from Google Calendar, email invitation or a URL. You can also set the privacy level of Hangouts to ensure that they can’t be accidentally opened to the public, ideal if you need to discuss sensitive information or projects for example.
Activating premium features
If you are an administrator for your company’s Google Apps account, then you can enable these features by:
- Signing into your Google Admin panel. This can be accessed by typing ‘admin.google.com‘ into the URL bar in your browser.
- Clicking on Other Google Services followed by Google+.
- Scrolling down to the premium features section and clicking on Enable Google+ premium features.
- Clicking on Sharing Settings and modifying or enabling the different premium features.
If you are looking to learn more about using these features or Google+ get in touch with us today to see how we can help.