Better group chat controls are coming to Google Hangouts

Many organizations use group chats in Google Hangouts to manage projects, plan events, and participate in other chat and collaboration tasks. We’re happy to announce that in the coming weeks several features are coming to Google Hangouts to make it more easy and useful to use group chats at work.

Share your group chats with short links

Group chat participants can now share a link to invite others to join the chat. This is particularly useful for on boarding new team members to a project, or to reach everyone in a mailing list. Rather than adding everyone at once, people can opt-in to the group chat.

Search for groups from your Google Hangouts contacts list

In order to make it easier to get to your group chats, you can also easily find your group conversations by searching for the group name or participant name.

Additional controls to manage group chat access

When team members leave a project, it may be necessary to remove them from group chats. Now, anyone who is directly invited to a chat will be able to remove others from the group chat, removing that person’s access to the chat history and notifying the group participants. Only by being directly invited back by someone already in the group, can the former member rejoin the chat.

Note for Administrators

These Google Hangouts changes to group chats will continue to follow the administrative controls you’ve set in the Admin console. You can learn more in this Help Center article.

Link sharing and removing from groups on Google Hangouts is now available on all platforms. Group search is already available on Android and will be coming to iOS soon. Finally, we’re looking at additional ways to make group conversations even better in the future, so please stay tuned.

Launch Details
Release track:
Launching to both Rapid release and Scheduled release