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More details about the upcoming migration of Currents content and communities to Spaces

This week Google Workspace hosted a webinar with more information about the migration from Currents to Google Chat Spaces.


As Google+ shut down for personal accounts in 2019, Currents was launched as the evolution of Google+ for G Suite (Google Workspace) users. In July 2020 all remaining Google+ content was migrated to Currents.

Currents was notably absent from Google’s big Google Workspace “Home for Work” launch in the fall of 2020. That did include Gmail, Docs, Drive, Calendar, Meet, and (notably) Chat. Those Google services are integrated with each other, with Gmail as a sort of home base.

With Currents out in the cold, it was not a big surprise when in February Google announced that Currents would shut down in 2023. But not all will be lost! Some Currents content and communities will be migrated to Google Chat Spaces.

If you use Currents, I recommend watching this week's webinar video for an overview of how the migration will work.

A few notable limitations:
  • Communities without posts after July 2020 will NOT be migrated
  • Google+ Posts (posted before July 2020) will NOT be migrated
  • Shared Communities with owners from multiple Google Workspace domains can only be owned by and have managers from one domain
  • Google is still looking into how to migrate Posts made by “Guests” (people outside your Google Workspace domain)
  • Up to 200 replies to a post will be migrated as inline replies to the original post
  • Only active members of a community (who have made posts or engaged with posts since July 2020) will be migrated to a Space. Inactive members will be invited to join the Space.
  • Organizational, personal, public posts, and draft posts will not be migrated
  • Images larger than 200 MB and videos will not be migrated
Be sure to review the Currents to Spaces feature migration overview in the Google Workspace admin help center which has a lot more details on what will and will not be moving over to Spaces.

This is going to be complicated!  

For content that will not be migrated, Google recommends:
  • Create a new Chat Space, and copying the post contents into the Space
  • Use Google Takeout (takeout.google.com) to create an archive of the post data. Google Workspace admins may have to enable this service.
Features requested by attendees at this week's webinar included:
  • More Space Manager moderation controls (sounds like those will be coming)
  • Embedding Spaces in Google Sites, the way Currents can be embedded (Google Workspace is “evaluating this and will include the details in the external feature mapping doc”)
  • Public Spaces (Google Workspace will “evaluate the suggestion for future milestones”)
If you are the owner of a Currents Community, but haven't been using Spaces, it is probably a good time to set up a Space to get used to the features. 

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