Google is rolling out a small feature to Google Meet that gives Google Workspace subscribers a new way to handle shared presentations by popping them out into a standalone window. The feature is already rolling out for subscribers on the Rapid Release track, but Scheduled Release domains have to wait a little longer until February 23.
Here"s how it works: you hover your mouse cursor directly over the active presentation view to bring up the bottom control bar. Once that menu appears, there should be an open in new window option, right beside the "Enter fullscreen" and "Zoom" buttons. Clicking that icon pops the content out of the browser tab.
Google says this new feature will come in handy in cases where you actually want to see the reactions of the people you are talking to while looking at a spreadsheet or document. It stops the shared content from dominating the interface and lets you keep an eye on the video feed while scrolling through the data elsewhere.
In other Meet news, Google recently rolled out two-way interoperability between Microsoft Teams and its own video conferencing ecosystem. The integration lets people cross over into competing video call environments using dedicated room hardware.
To make this work from the Google side, you must use a Chrome OS-based Google Meet hardware device like a Chromebox compute unit equipped with a touch controller to join a Teams lobby. The inverse connection has strict requirements of its own, while those on Windows attempting to jump onto a Google bridge must use a Windows-based Microsoft Teams Room device.
In Teams, admins can set up this cross-platform connection by configuring the Exchange mailbox for the local room to process third-party meeting invites. They must verify that their tenant security policies allow outbound connections to exterior services before adding Google URLs to any internal software exception lists.