In Google Chat, Spaces serve as a central place for team collaboration—instead of starting an email chain or scheduling a meeting, teams can move conversations and collaboration into a space, giving everybody the ability to stay connected, reference team or project info and revisit work asynchronously.
Besides the new ability to programmatically create and populate Google Chat spaces outlined in the source post, if you are a member of the Google Cloud Partner Advantage program you may want to apply for the new Google Workspace Developer Preview Program. This program will give you access to this new Chat API functionality and other Google Workspace Developer preview developments.
Not a Cloud Partner Advantage member? You can apply to join
If you are interested in building on the Google Chat platform there is the What’s new in the world of Google Chat apps session at Google I/O (this session will be available on-demand from 12 May 2022).
2021 was also a year for Platform milestones, Google Workspace grew to more than 3 billion users globally, we reached more than 5,300 public apps in the Google Workspace Marketplace, and we crossed over 4.8 billion apps installed (up from 1 billion in 2020)! We were also busy bringing Platform innovations and improving our developer experience to help building for Google Workspace easier and faster. Here’s a look at some of the key enhancements the Google Workspace Platform brought to the developer community.
There were a number of announcements for Google Workspace developers in 2021 and in this post Charles Maxson provides a summary of the key points.
Google Workspace offers a broad set of tools and capabilities that empowers creators and developers of all experience levels to build a wide range of custom productivity solutions. For professional developers looking to integrate their own app experiences into Workspace, the platform enables deep integrations with frameworks like Google Workspace Add-ons and Chat apps, as well as deep access to the full suite of Google Workspace apps via numerous REST APIs. And for citizen developers on the business side or developers looking to build solutions quickly and easily, tools like Apps Script and AppSheet make it simple to customize, extend, and automate workflows directly within Google Workspace.
At Next ‘21 we have 7 sessions you won’t want to miss that cover the breadth of the platform. From no-code and low-code solutions to content for developers looking to publish in the Google Workspace Marketplace and reach the more than 3 billion users in Workspace, Next ‘21 has something for everyone.
Click through to the source to read more about the must-see Google Workspace sessions for developers and creators.
For community members receiving these timely updates, this “bot” may seem magical. In reality, it’s neither magic nor a traditional Chat bot, so the reference in the Chat UI calling it a “bot” is a bit of a misnomer. The Google Updates “bot” is in fact a simple Google Apps Script application that parses the RSS feed about new posts, and sends them asynchronously to the room via webhooks.
We’ve highlighted the ‘Wexbot’ before both in a Pulse post and in a Totally Unscripted episode, but nice to see it also feature in the official Google Developers blog.
Join this Ask Me Anything Session to get answers from the Google Workspace Development Platform and Google Workspace Developer Relations teams about how to integrate with your own solutions.
As part of Google I/O several of the Google team are hosting a Google Workspace developers ‘ask me anything’ session. The session panel includes Matt Izatt (Google Workspace Product Manager), Olaf Hubel (Google Workspace DevRel Manage), Charles Maxson (Google Developer Advocate and Totally Unscripted co-host) and Steven Bazyl Google Workspace Developer Relations Engineer. Follow the link to sign-up and follow the session.
Today we are pleased to announce that building Google Workspace Add-ons has evolved once again, this time to offer developers an alternative to using Apps Script for building add-ons with the general availability of Alternate Runtimes for Google Workspace Add-ons.
While Alternate Runtimes enables the same functionality that Apps Script does for building add-ons, the flexibility and the freedom to choose your dev environment plus the opportunity to decouple from Apps Script will likely yield greater developer productivity and performance gains for future projects. This commonly requested feature by Google Workspace solution developers has finally become a reality.
As part of this post there is an example from Riël Notermans, owner of Zzapps (and Google Developer Expert), highlighting some key takeaways on Alternate Runtimes development and deployment.
Meet the Google Workspace Developer Experts, a global network of experienced technology experts, thought leaders, and influencers who actively support developer communities around the world.
If you are starting out on a new product, environment or beginning to learn to code finding people to connect with within an existing community can often be a challenge. Thanks to the efforts of Charles Maxson hopefully those connections are made a bit easier.
The new Apps Script IDE features the same rich integration with Google Workspace as it did before, allowing you to get started building solutions without having to install or configure anything. If you are working on a standalone script project application, you can use the Apps Script Dashboard to launch your project directly, or if you are working on a container bound project in Sheets, Slides or Docs, you can do so from selecting Tools > Script editor from their top menus.
Charles Maxson, Developer Advocate Google Cloud, has highlighted some features Google Apps Script developers new and old should keep an eye out for. I think one of the big ones for experienced Apps Script developers who work mostly in the online editor is going to be the context menu options and the Command Palette. Find out more in the source post.
Millions of users know G Suite as a collection of communication and productivity apps that enables teams to easily create, communicate, collaborate, and discover content to supercharge teamwork. Beneath the surface of this well-serving collection of apps is also an extensible platform that enables developers to build targeted custom experiences and integrations utilizing these apps, allowing G Suite’s vast user base to get even more value out of the platform. At first glance, it may not be natural to think of the tools you use for day-to-day productivity and collaboration as a developer platform. But consider what makes up a developer platform; Languages, APIs, runtimes, frameworks, IDEs, ecosystem, etc; G Suite offers developers all of these things and more. Let’s take a closer look at what makes up the G Suite developer platform and how you can use it.
Nice overview of the G Suite developer platform from Charles Maxson. I always find it useful to see how others pitch the platform and from this piece useful to see how Apps Script is put in context with other G Suite development options.
