Breakout Rooms Come to Some Google Meet Users

Google Meet is getting breakout rooms for G Suite Enterprise for Education customers that will allow organizers to divide rooms into smaller groups during video calls.

According to a G Suite blog, users can create up to 100 breakout rooms in one single call. Call participants will be randomly and equally distributed across rooms, and event creators can manually move people into different rooms.

Breakout rooms can only be created during a video call on a computer.

The feature is currently only available for Enterprise for Education customers, but Google will eventually roll this out to other customers including other education users.

According to Google, the feature was highly requested, as educators can use it to offer increased engagement in their classes and provide a platform for small group discussions or working time.

Educators can jump between breakout rooms to monitor and participate in those discussions.

This comes shortly after Google announced a rebranding of its G Suite group of productivity apps as Google Workspace. Education users, for now, are still operating out of the G Suite brand.

The rebranding includes new features designed to make Google’s tools more integrated with one another.

Recent upgrades to Workspace – formerly G Suite – included making it easier for business users to connect with customers and partners via guest features in Chat and Drive, and the company is expanding on that with the ability to create and collaborate on a document with guests in a Chat room.

In Docs, Sheets and Slides, customers can now preview a linked file without having to open the tab to help users save time and avoid looking through their files to find something.

Another new feature is the ability to @mention someone in a document to call up their contact details and quick actions like reaching out via email, chat or video.

The company already said it was bringing Meet picture-in-Picture to Gmail and Chat so users can both see and hear their coworkers while they work in those apps, but Google is also bringing that same feature to Docs, Sheets and Slides.

Aside from the new features, Google’s rebrand includes new four-color icons for Workspace apps like Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Meet and more.