Wednesday, April 10, 2019

Introducing Currents, the newest G Suite app

This announcement was made at Google Cloud Next ‘19 in San Francisco. Check out Next OnAir to tune into the livestream or watch session recordings following the event.

What’s changing 

Launching first to beta, Currents is a G Suite app that enables people to have meaningful discussions and interactions across your organization, helping keep everyone in the know and giving leaders the opportunity to connect with their employees.

Currents is replacing Google+ for G Suite, and has a new look, feel, and set of features. All of your organization’s existing Google+ content will automatically transfer to Currents once you are enrolled in the beta.


Who’s impacted 

Admins and end users.

Why you’d use it 

Exchange ideas at scale: 
Currents makes it easy to have meaningful discussions by enabling leaders and employees to exchange ideas across the organization and gather valuable feedback and input from others — without flooding inboxes.

  • Currents features a streamlined experience for composing content — users can easily tag their posts and attach relevant attachments or images. 
    • Once a user posts, others can comment, give feedback, and ask questions all in the same place. 
    • Individual users can also track analytics for their posts. 
Currents also gives leaders a way to engage with their employees more directly, allowing them to take the pulse of their organization and understand what’s important.

  • Posts from leadership can be given priority in the home stream, improving visibility across the organization to drive alignment. 


Connect people to content: 
Currents connects employees to useful and timely content that is personalized to their role and interests. Giving employees access to relevant content keeps them connected to the organization and creates more learning opportunities:

  • Content remains on Currents over time, so users can revisit and engage at a later date. 
  • Tags and streams make it easy to find and discover content of interest. 
  • Content in the home stream is ordered by relevance so it’s prioritized for what is most important to that individual, or users can choose to sort it chronologically. 

Manage and curate with ease: 
Admins can shape the discussion in the organization by creating custom streams to promote specific content to a targeted set of employees or the entire company. Additionally, admins can measure engagement across the platform with metrics to track usage and understand what content is resonating across the organization.

  • Admins can delegate content management responsibilities to a new role called Content Administrator. 
  •  These Content Admins can easily create custom streams, manage tags, define leaders, moderate content, and track usage and engagement with metrics. 

How to get started 

  • Admins: To request access to the beta program for your organization, please fill out this form
  • End users: No action required. 

Helpful links 



Availability 

G Suite editions 
  • Available to all G Suite editions.

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