Google Cloud’s G Suite announces new features in Hangouts Meet, Chat, Calendar and Sheets that enhance collaboration and interoperability with existing third-party enterprise tools ahead of their appearance and debut at InfoComm 2018 in Las Vegas [booth N3114].
New G Suite features include:
- Interoperability between Hangouts Meet and other video conferencing systems. In partnership with Pexip, teams will be able to join a meeting on Meet from their preferred equipment in the coming weeks. We’re also making it possible for Microsoft Skype for Business users to easily join a meeting on Meet directly from their Skype app.
- Interoperability and smart features in Calendar including Microsoft Exchange Resource Booking and third-party conferencing
- Interoperability in Google Sheets with Sheets SAP that allows you to export your data directly from SAP ERP to Sheets
- Collaborate in Hangouts Chat with people outside of your domain / organization at no additional cost
The average employee uses 36 cloud services at work to collaborate or share files, according to a blog by Rany Ng, director of product management for the new G Suite. The new G Suite enhancements aim to “reduce complexity for your teams,” according to the blog post.
They include third-party add-ons in Gmail and Google Docs and improved interoperability with Microsoft, new integrations in Hangouts Meet and Calendar “to help you have even better meeting experiences regardless of the conference technology you use,” according to Ng’s blog post.
The updates also include new ways to collaborate in Hangouts Chat and Sheets.
G Suite Collaboration Compatibility
Hangouts Meet will be compatible with traditional video conferencing systems, including Polycom and Cisco. [related]
In partnership with Pexip, teams will be able to join a meeting on Meet from their preferred equipment in the coming weeks. Microsoft Skype for Business users can also join a meeting on Meet directly from the Skype app.
You’ll also soon see support for third-party conferencing natively in Google Calendar.
Conference providers will be able to build add-ons to create, view and join a video conference from a Calendar event. Users can click a link in the Calendar invite to join on web or mobile.
Cisco Webex is building an add-on to help users schedule meetings from Google Calendar without a download or plug-in. Arkadin, GoToMeeting, LogMeIn, Dialpad, RingCentral, Vidyo and Vonage are also building add-ons to help them meet with their customers.
These third-party conferencing add-ons will be available in the new G Suite Marketplace in the coming months.
Room Booking with G Suite
Ng also announced a way for users to book rooms, equipment and more in Microsoft Exchange. Users will be able to view and book resources stored in Exchange and Office 365 in the coming months.
They’ll also be able to include people from outside their organizations in Chat, making it easy to stay aligned with clients, vendors, partners and others, all from one place.
Finally, in an upcoming SAP release, employees will be able to discover additional insights from their ERP content by importing it directly into Google Sheets.
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With this new integration, users can skip manually exporting data to CSVs and uploading them to Drive. Instead, they can export directly to Sheets and analyze data with tools like intelligent pivot tables.
They can also skip formatting by recording macros in Sheets, giving them the ability to share information across teams right away.
Click here for more information about Google Cloud Next ’18 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco July 24-26.
