Tag Archives: Hangouts

Meet the new Hangouts

Last year, we talked about doubling down on our enterprise focus for Hangouts and our commitment to building communication tools focused on the way teams work: from anywhere, at anytime. More than half of the workforce will contribute remotely by 2020, so businesses require purpose-built tools to help employees succeed. Our customers have told us it should be effortless for them to connect over video and that chat should be more collaborative, so we’re evolving Hangouts to focus on two experiences that help bring teams together and keep work moving forward: Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat.

Start your meetings with a quick click: meet Hangouts Meet

Hangouts Meet is a new video meeting experience with one goal: make joining meetings effortless so that people can be as productive as they are when they’re face-to-face. We've consistently heard from customers about ways we can improve Hangouts, like making it easier to work with external clients or reducing the ‘time to start’ a meeting to zero. That's why we've built Hangouts Meet to have a light, fast interface and smart participant management.

Hangouts

Running 30-person video conferences smoothly is easy with Meet. Simply start your meetings with a shared link — no accounts, plugins, downloads or hassles. Meet provides a place for everyone to join from Calendar, an email invite or an ad-hoc share. If you’re dialing in from a conference room, your laptop or using the dedicated mobile app, just a few clicks and you’re in.

Braintree, a PayPal service, has been using Hangouts Meet over the past three months to connect employees across board rooms, meeting rooms, breakout spaces and offices. "Based on initial use, Hangouts Meet is one of the most frictionless video conferencing systems we’ve experienced,” says Jerome Knapp, Manager of Systems Administration at Braintree. “Starting a meeting or sharing a document from the web, calendar invite or meeting room involves a single click. It’s an antidote to the VC fatigue that’s stopped my users and executives from taking full advantage of other systems.”

With Meet, native, full-screen presenting makes it easy to showcase your team’s projects. And as Meet integrates directly with G Suite, information you need about each meeting is automatically pulled from Calendar. For our G Suite Enterprise customers, each meeting comes with a dedicated dial-in phone number, so team members on the road can feel connected and productive in meetings despite wi-fi or data issues.

Hangouts Meet is one of the most frictionless video conferencing systems we’ve experienced. Jerome Knapp
Systems Administration at Braintree

Bring your teams together on projects: introducing Hangouts Chat

Hangouts Chat is an intelligent communication app for teams that takes direct messaging in Hangouts and evolves it to reflect the way modern teams talk business.

Working on a project means bringing cross-functional teams together, discussing tasks that need to get done and sharing your work. Chat is built with exactly this in mind.

Dedicated, virtual rooms create a lasting home for each project, with threaded conversations so your team’s progress is easy to follow. Chat’s deep integration with G Suite means shared content from Drive and Docs, or photos and videos can be viewed directly in conversations. And powerful, filterable search in Chat makes it easy to find all your content dating back to the start of the project.

Chat is built not only to reflect the way teams work, but to provide a platform for the enterprise tools they work with. The Hangouts Chat platform supports a wide range of capabilities — from bots to simple scripting using Google App Script — and integrates with third-party applications so teams can do more right from within the conversation. Some companies we’re teaming up with to build out the platform include: Asana, Box, Prosperworks and Zendesk. And to make workflows even easier, Chat features @meet, an intelligent bot built on top of the Hangouts platform that uses natural language processing and machine learning to automatically schedule meetings for your team with Hangouts Meet and Google Calendar.

Hangouts Meet is generally available today and will gradually roll out to all G Suite customers over the next few weeks. G Suite customers can apply to try Hangouts Chat through the Early Adopter Program.  

Source: Drive


Powering enterprise productivity and secure collaboration with major updates to G suite

The promise of the cloud has always been to offer flexibility, access and security at a scale that’s unimaginable in legacy enterprise productivity solutions. Your data and applications offer the most value when they live in a connected cloud, and when combined with Google’s machine intelligence, they offer insights that can move your business beyond productivity.

In order for Google to deliver on this cloud promise, we must not only meet enterprise companies where they are today in terms of security, compliance, and connectivity standards — but also raise the bar for what’s possible with our advanced machine intelligence capabilities. That’s why we introduced G Suite. In the past year, we’ve launched more than 300 features and updates to help customers reach their cloud potential. And today, at Google Cloud Next, we announced the next generation of our collaboration and communication tools, designed to help our customers take it to the next level:

  • A Google Drive tailor-made for the enterprise
  • An evolved Hangouts purpose-built for teams: Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat
  • An Add-ons platform to integrate Gmail with the applications customers use every day
  • @meet, a machine learning-powered bot that uses natural language to schedule meetings

Introducing Team Drives and fresh features for enterprises in Drive

Since the launch of Google Drive, we’ve focused on making it simple for people to easily store, share and access their files. With more than 800 million active users on the Drive platform, we’re thrilled to see Drive delivering on this promise. These days, we’re focused on ensuring Drive addresses the unique needs of our enterprise customers, like compliance, data security and file ownership when teams change.

Today, we announced key enhancements in Drive to do just that:

  • Team Drives work the way people in enterprises do: in groups, not just as individuals. Team Drives enable teams to simply and securely manage permissions, ownership, and file access for an organization. Team Drives are generally available today for G Suite Business, Education, and Enterprise customers.
  • Drive File Stream allows employees to access tremendous amounts of cloud storage content directly from their desktops, without requiring a sync or monopolizing hard drive space. G Suite customers can apply for the Early Adopter Program (EAP) today.
  • Google Vault for Drive gains additional controls so admins can manage retention and legal hold policies. Google Vault for Drive is generally available today for G Suite Business, Education and Enterprise customers.
  • AppBridge, a partner that we’ve worked with closely for years, will be joining the G Suite team. We’re welcoming AppBridge to help our largest customers manage some of their most complex data migrations to Drive. 

Team Drives

Reimagining Hangouts and better brainstorming with Jamboard

We’re passionate about finding the best way for teams to work together and communicate, especially at large companies with workers around the world. Our customers have told us it should be effortless for them to connect over video and that chat should be more collaborative, which is why today we’re evolving Hangouts to focus on two new experiences: Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat.

Hangouts Meet is a new video meeting experience designed to make meetings frictionless. Up to 30 people can join a meeting within seconds — no downloads or browser plugins required, and it integrates with G Suite so you can present files natively. Anyone can join from any Android of iOS device, and a dial-in phone number for each meeting helps connect employees who are on the road without wifi/data. Meet is generally available today and will gradually roll out to all G Suite customers over the next few weeks.

Hangouts

Hangouts Chat offers teams a new way to connect with each other in virtual rooms, so they can keep work moving forward, even when they can’t meet face to face. With deep integrations with G Suite, teams can embed content right in the conversation, so they can interact and discuss items from Docs, Sheets, Slides, Calendar and other files. We also designed Chat to integrate with a wide set of enterprise tools, and we’re working with companies like Asana, Box and Zendesk to seamlessly integrate existing workflows into Chat. G Suite customers can apply to try Chat through the EAP.

Chat GIF

Lastly, we introduced Jamboard in the early adopter program last fall to help teams move real-time collaboration upstream in the creative process. Today, we announced that Jamboard will enter general availability this May at a price of $4999 plus a $600 annual management and support fee (discounted to $300 for your first year if you purchase by Sept. 30, 2017). Interested customers can sign up to be notified when Jamboard is available to order.

Jamboard

Integrating G Suite with services that businesses use every day

We built G Suite to be a workforce platform, not just a set of apps. Just as our apps work well together, they also need to work well with other services that employees rely on in their workflows. This is why we provide ways to integrate across our suite in Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Cloud Search. Today, we continue this effort by introducing Gmail Add-ons, a new way to integrate powerful enterprise workflows with Gmail; uniquely, our Add-ons are triggered by the context of the email.

Add-ons make it easy for developers to bring third-party applications into Gmail. Developers simply write an integration once, and it will work in the Gmail apps on Android, iOS and the web right away. Gmail users will be able to install Add-ons via the G Suite Marketplace later this year. Intuit, Salesforce and ProsperWorks are already working on Gmail Add-ons, and we encourage other interested developers to sign up today for our Developer Preview.

Intuit

Last fall, we announced efforts with Salesforce to build tighter integrations with G Suite apps, and starting today, businesses can use Edit Opportunities in Google Sheets to save time. Sales reps can simply sync a Salesforce Opportunity List View to Sheets to bulk edit data, and the changes are synced automatically to Salesforce, no upload required. This integration supports business logic and validation rules and even lets sales reps use Explore in Sheets to help answer natural language questions.

Moving beyond productivity with Google’s machine intelligence

Beyond meeting enterprise needs, we have been looking to the future by regularly adding machine intelligence innovations throughout our G Suite products. For example, Explore in Sheets lets you skip complex formulas and ask questions in a natural language, Calendar Find a Time intelligently avoids scheduling conflicts and suggests alternatives, and Quick Access in Drive (which starting today also works with Team Drives on iOS and Android devices, and is coming soon to the web) uses context to automatically surface the most relevant files you need.

And we’re using this machine intelligence to fix daily frustrations like scheduling meetings, too. Today, as a part of Hangouts Chat, we introduced @meet, an intelligent bot that automates the scheduling of meetings. With all of the variables and options, this can be a tedious task for people to perform, but it’s simple for the bot. @meet will be available for customers that sign up for the EAP of  Hangouts Chat.

bot image

Learn more

Today marks our continued commitment to moving enterprises beyond productivity. To learn more, you can read about the announcements for Drive, Hangouts, and Gmail Add-ons. If you’re a G Suite customer, we encourage you to sign up for the Drive File Stream and Hangouts Chat EAPs.

Source: Gmail Blog


Meet the new Hangouts

Last year, we talked about doubling down on our enterprise focus for Hangouts and our commitment to building communication tools focused on the way teams work: from anywhere, at anytime. More than half of the workforce will contribute remotely by 2020, so businesses require purpose-built tools to help employees succeed. Our customers have told us it should be effortless for them to connect over video and that chat should be more collaborative, so we’re evolving Hangouts to focus on two experiences that help bring teams together and keep work moving forward: Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat.

Start your meetings with a quick click: meet Hangouts Meet

Hangouts Meet is a new video meeting experience with one goal: make joining meetings effortless so that people can be as productive as they are when they’re face-to-face. We've consistently heard from customers about ways we can improve Hangouts, like making it easier to work with external clients or reducing the ‘time to start’ a meeting to zero. That's why we've built Hangouts Meet to have a light, fast interface and smart participant management.

Hangouts

Running 30-person video conferences smoothly is easy with Meet. Simply start your meetings with a shared link — no accounts, plugins, downloads or hassles. Meet provides a place for everyone to join from Calendar, an email invite or an ad-hoc share. If you’re dialing in from a conference room, your laptop or using the dedicated mobile app, just a few clicks and you’re in.

Braintree, a PayPal service, has been using Hangouts Meet over the past three months to connect employees across board rooms, meeting rooms, breakout spaces and offices. "Based on initial use, Hangouts Meet is one of the most frictionless video conferencing systems we’ve experienced,” says Jerome Knapp, Manager of Systems Administration at Braintree. “Starting a meeting or sharing a document from the web, calendar invite or meeting room involves a single click. It’s an antidote to the VC fatigue that’s stopped my users and executives from taking full advantage of other systems.”

With Meet, native, full-screen presenting makes it easy to showcase your team’s projects. And as Meet integrates directly with G Suite, information you need about each meeting is automatically pulled from Calendar. For our G Suite Enterprise customers, each meeting comes with a dedicated dial-in phone number, so team members on the road can feel connected and productive in meetings despite wi-fi or data issues.

Hangouts Meet is one of the most frictionless video conferencing systems we’ve experienced. Jerome Knapp Systems Administration at Braintree

Bring your teams together on projects: introducing Hangouts Chat

Hangouts Chat is an intelligent communication app for teams that takes direct messaging in Hangouts and evolves it to reflect the way modern teams talk business.

Working on a project means bringing cross-functional teams together, discussing tasks that need to get done and sharing your work. Chat is built with exactly this in mind.

GIF

Dedicated, virtual rooms create a lasting home for each project, with threaded conversations so your team’s progress is easy to follow. Chat’s deep integration with G Suite means shared content from Drive and Docs, or photos and videos can be viewed directly in conversations. And powerful, filterable search in Chat makes it easy to find all your content dating back to the start of the project.

Chat is built not only to reflect the way teams work, but to provide a platform for the enterprise tools they work with. The Hangouts Chat platform supports a wide range of capabilities — from bots to simple scripting using Google App Script — and integrates with third-party applications so teams can do more right from within the conversation. Some companies we’re teaming up with to build out the platform include: Asana, Box, Prosperworks and Zendesk. And to make workflows even easier, Chat features @meet, an intelligent bot built on top of the Hangouts platform that uses natural language processing and machine learning to automatically schedule meetings for your team with Hangouts Meet and Google Calendar.

ahoy

Hangouts Meet is generally available today and will gradually roll out to all G Suite customers over the next few weeks. G Suite customers can apply to try Hangouts Chat through the Early Adopter Program.  

Meet the new Hangouts

Last year, we talked about doubling down on our enterprise focus for Hangouts and our commitment to building communication tools focused on the way teams work: from anywhere, at anytime. More than half of the workforce will contribute remotely by 2020, so businesses require purpose-built tools to help employees succeed. Our customers have told us it should be effortless for them to connect over video and that chat should be more collaborative, so we’re evolving Hangouts to focus on two experiences that help bring teams together and keep work moving forward: Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat.

Start your meetings with a quick click: meet Hangouts Meet

Hangouts Meet is a new video meeting experience with one goal: make joining meetings effortless so that people can be as productive as they are when they’re face-to-face. We've consistently heard from customers about ways we can improve Hangouts, like making it easier to work with external clients or reducing the ‘time to start’ a meeting to zero. That's why we've built Hangouts Meet to have a light, fast interface and smart participant management.

Hangouts

Running 30-person video conferences smoothly is easy with Meet. Simply start your meetings with a shared link — no accounts, plugins, downloads or hassles. Meet provides a place for everyone to join from Calendar, an email invite or an ad-hoc share. If you’re dialing in from a conference room, your laptop or using the dedicated mobile app, just a few clicks and you’re in.

Braintree, a PayPal service, has been using Hangouts Meet over the past three months to connect employees across board rooms, meeting rooms, breakout spaces and offices. "Based on initial use, Hangouts Meet is one of the most frictionless video conferencing systems we’ve experienced,” says Jerome Knapp, Manager of Systems Administration at Braintree. “Starting a meeting or sharing a document from the web, calendar invite or meeting room involves a single click. It’s an antidote to the VC fatigue that’s stopped my users and executives from taking full advantage of other systems.”

With Meet, native, full-screen presenting makes it easy to showcase your team’s projects. And as Meet integrates directly with G Suite, information you need about each meeting is automatically pulled from Calendar. For our G Suite Enterprise customers, each meeting comes with a dedicated dial-in phone number, so team members on the road can feel connected and productive in meetings despite wi-fi or data issues.

Hangouts Meet is one of the most frictionless video conferencing systems we’ve experienced. Jerome Knapp Systems Administration at Braintree

Bring your teams together on projects: introducing Hangouts Chat

Hangouts Chat is an intelligent communication app for teams that takes direct messaging in Hangouts and evolves it to reflect the way modern teams talk business.

Working on a project means bringing cross-functional teams together, discussing tasks that need to get done and sharing your work. Chat is built with exactly this in mind.

GIF

Dedicated, virtual rooms create a lasting home for each project, with threaded conversations so your team’s progress is easy to follow. Chat’s deep integration with G Suite means shared content from Drive and Docs, or photos and videos can be viewed directly in conversations. And powerful, filterable search in Chat makes it easy to find all your content dating back to the start of the project.

Chat is built not only to reflect the way teams work, but to provide a platform for the enterprise tools they work with. The Hangouts Chat platform supports a wide range of capabilities — from bots to simple scripting using Google App Script — and integrates with third-party applications so teams can do more right from within the conversation. Some companies we’re teaming up with to build out the platform include: Asana, Box, Prosperworks and Zendesk. And to make workflows even easier, Chat features @meet, an intelligent bot built on top of the Hangouts platform that uses natural language processing and machine learning to automatically schedule meetings for your team with Hangouts Meet and Google Calendar.

ahoy

Hangouts Meet is generally available today and will gradually roll out to all G Suite customers over the next few weeks. G Suite customers can apply to try Hangouts Chat through the Early Adopter Program.  

Source: Google Cloud


Powering enterprise productivity and secure collaboration with major updates to G suite

The promise of the cloud has always been to offer flexibility, access and security at a scale that’s unimaginable in legacy enterprise productivity solutions. Your data and applications offer the most value when they live in a connected cloud, and when combined with Google’s machine intelligence, they offer insights that can move your business beyond productivity.

In order for Google to deliver on this cloud promise, we must not only meet enterprise companies where they are today in terms of security, compliance, and connectivity standards — but also raise the bar for what’s possible with our advanced machine intelligence capabilities. That’s why we introduced G Suite. In the past year, we’ve launched more than 300 features and updates to help customers reach their cloud potential. And today, at Google Cloud Next, we announced the next generation of our collaboration and communication tools, designed to help our customers take it to the next level:

  • A Google Drive tailor-made for the enterprise
  • An evolved Hangouts purpose-built for teams: Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat
  • An Add-ons platform to integrate Gmail with the applications customers use every day
  • @meet, a machine learning-powered bot that uses natural language to schedule meetings

Introducing Team Drives and fresh features for enterprises in Drive

Since the launch of Google Drive, we’ve focused on making it simple for people to easily store, share and access their files. With more than 800 million active users on the Drive platform, we’re thrilled to see Drive delivering on this promise. These days, we’re focused on ensuring Drive addresses the unique needs of our enterprise customers, like compliance, data security and file ownership when teams change.

Today, we announced key enhancements in Drive to do just that:

  • Team Drives work the way people in enterprises do: in groups, not just as individuals. Team Drives enable teams to simply and securely manage permissions, ownership, and file access for an organization. Team Drives are generally available today for G Suite Business, Education, and Enterprise customers.
  • Drive File Stream allows employees to access tremendous amounts of cloud storage content directly from their desktops, without requiring a sync or monopolizing hard drive space. G Suite customers can apply for the Early Adopter Program (EAP) today.
  • Google Vault for Drive gains additional controls so admins can manage retention and legal hold policies. Google Vault for Drive is generally available today for G Suite Business, Education and Enterprise customers.
  • AppBridge, a partner that we’ve worked with closely for years, will be joining the G Suite team. We’re welcoming AppBridge to help our largest customers manage some of their most complex data migrations to Drive. 

Team Drives

Reimagining Hangouts and better brainstorming with Jamboard

We’re passionate about finding the best way for teams to work together and communicate, especially at large companies with workers around the world. Our customers have told us it should be effortless for them to connect over video and that chat should be more collaborative, which is why today we’re evolving Hangouts to focus on two new experiences: Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat.

Hangouts Meet is a new video meeting experience designed to make meetings frictionless. Up to 30 people can join a meeting within seconds — no downloads or browser plugins required, and it integrates with G Suite so you can present files natively. Anyone can join from any Android of iOS device, and a dial-in phone number for each meeting helps connect employees who are on the road without wifi/data. Meet is generally available today and will gradually roll out to all G Suite customers over the next few weeks.

Hangouts

Hangouts Chat offers teams a new way to connect with each other in virtual rooms, so they can keep work moving forward, even when they can’t meet face to face. With deep integrations with G Suite, teams can embed content right in the conversation, so they can interact and discuss items from Docs, Sheets, Slides, Calendar and other files. We also designed Chat to integrate with a wide set of enterprise tools, and we’re working with companies like Asana, Box and Zendesk to seamlessly integrate existing workflows into Chat. G Suite customers can apply to try Chat through the EAP.

Chat GIF

Lastly, we introduced Jamboard in the early adopter program last fall to help teams move real-time collaboration upstream in the creative process. Today, we announced that Jamboard will enter general availability this May at a price of $4999 plus a $600 annual management and support fee (discounted to $300 for your first year if you purchase by Sept. 30, 2017). Interested customers can sign up to be notified when Jamboard is available to order.

Jamboard

Integrating G Suite with services that businesses use every day

We built G Suite to be a workforce platform, not just a set of apps. Just as our apps work well together, they also need to work well with other services that employees rely on in their workflows. This is why we provide ways to integrate across our suite in Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Cloud Search. Today, we continue this effort by introducing Gmail Add-ons, a new way to integrate powerful enterprise workflows with Gmail; uniquely, our Add-ons are triggered by the context of the email.

Add-ons make it easy for developers to bring third-party applications into Gmail. Developers simply write an integration once, and it will work in the Gmail apps on Android, iOS and the web right away. Gmail users will be able to install Add-ons via the G Suite Marketplace later this year. Intuit, Salesforce and ProsperWorks are already working on Gmail Add-ons, and we encourage other interested developers to sign up today for our Developer Preview.

Intuit

Last fall, we announced efforts with Salesforce to build tighter integrations with G Suite apps, and starting today, businesses can use Edit Opportunities in Google Sheets to save time. Sales reps can simply sync a Salesforce Opportunity List View to Sheets to bulk edit data, and the changes are synced automatically to Salesforce, no upload required. This integration supports business logic and validation rules and even lets sales reps use Explore in Sheets to help answer natural language questions.

Moving beyond productivity with Google’s machine intelligence

Beyond meeting enterprise needs, we have been looking to the future by regularly adding machine intelligence innovations throughout our G Suite products. For example, Explore in Sheets lets you skip complex formulas and ask questions in a natural language, Calendar Find a Time intelligently avoids scheduling conflicts and suggests alternatives, and Quick Access in Drive (which starting today also works with Team Drives on iOS and Android devices, and is coming soon to the web) uses context to automatically surface the most relevant files you need.

And we’re using this machine intelligence to fix daily frustrations like scheduling meetings, too. Today, as a part of Hangouts Chat, we introduced @meet, an intelligent bot that automates the scheduling of meetings. With all of the variables and options, this can be a tedious task for people to perform, but it’s simple for the bot. @meet will be available for customers that sign up for the EAP of  Hangouts Chat.

bot image

Learn more

Today marks our continued commitment to moving enterprises beyond productivity. To learn more, you can read about the announcements for Drive, Hangouts, and Gmail Add-ons. If you’re a G Suite customer, we encourage you to sign up for the Drive File Stream and Hangouts Chat EAPs.

Source: Google Cloud


Powering enterprise productivity and secure collaboration with major updates to G suite

The promise of the cloud has always been to offer flexibility, access and security at a scale that’s unimaginable in legacy enterprise productivity solutions. Your data and applications offer the most value when they live in a connected cloud, and when combined with Google’s machine intelligence, they offer insights that can move your business beyond productivity.

In order for Google to deliver on this cloud promise, we must not only meet enterprise companies where they are today in terms of security, compliance, and connectivity standards — but also raise the bar for what’s possible with our advanced machine intelligence capabilities. That’s why we introduced G Suite. In the past year, we’ve launched more than 300 features and updates to help customers reach their cloud potential. And today, at Google Cloud Next, we announced the next generation of our collaboration and communication tools, designed to help our customers take it to the next level:

  • A Google Drive tailor-made for the enterprise
  • An evolved Hangouts purpose-built for teams: Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat
  • An Add-ons platform to integrate Gmail with the applications customers use every day
  • @meet, a machine learning-powered bot that uses natural language to schedule meetings

Introducing Team Drives and fresh features for enterprises in Drive

Since the launch of Google Drive, we’ve focused on making it simple for people to easily store, share and access their files. With more than 800 million active users on the Drive platform, we’re thrilled to see Drive delivering on this promise. These days, we’re focused on ensuring Drive addresses the unique needs of our enterprise customers, like compliance, data security and file ownership when teams change.

Today, we announced key enhancements in Drive to do just that:

  • Team Drives work the way people in enterprises do: in groups, not just as individuals. Team Drives enable teams to simply and securely manage permissions, ownership, and file access for an organization. Team Drives are generally available today for G Suite Business, Education, and Enterprise customers.
  • Drive File Stream allows employees to access tremendous amounts of cloud storage content directly from their desktops, without requiring a sync or monopolizing hard drive space. G Suite customers can apply for the Early Adopter Program (EAP) today.
  • Google Vault for Drive gains additional controls so admins can manage retention and legal hold policies. Google Vault for Drive is generally available today for G Suite Business, Education and Enterprise customers.
  • AppBridge, a partner that we’ve worked with closely for years, will be joining the G Suite team. We’re welcoming AppBridge to help our largest customers manage some of their most complex data migrations to Drive. 

Team Drives

Reimagining Hangouts and better brainstorming with Jamboard

We’re passionate about finding the best way for teams to work together and communicate, especially at large companies with workers around the world. Our customers have told us it should be effortless for them to connect over video and that chat should be more collaborative, which is why today we’re evolving Hangouts to focus on two new experiences: Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat.

Hangouts Meet is a new video meeting experience designed to make meetings frictionless. Up to 30 people can join a meeting within seconds — no downloads or browser plugins required, and it integrates with G Suite so you can present files natively. Anyone can join from any Android of iOS device, and a dial-in phone number for each meeting helps connect employees who are on the road without wifi/data. Meet is generally available today and will gradually roll out to all G Suite customers over the next few weeks.

Hangouts

Hangouts Chat offers teams a new way to connect with each other in virtual rooms, so they can keep work moving forward, even when they can’t meet face to face. With deep integrations with G Suite, teams can embed content right in the conversation, so they can interact and discuss items from Docs, Sheets, Slides, Calendar and other files. We also designed Chat to integrate with a wide set of enterprise tools, and we’re working with companies like Asana, Box and Zendesk to seamlessly integrate existing workflows into Chat. G Suite customers can apply to try Chat through the EAP.

Chat GIF

Lastly, we introduced Jamboard in the early adopter program last fall to help teams move real-time collaboration upstream in the creative process. Today, we announced that Jamboard will enter general availability this May at a price of $4999 plus a $600 annual management and support fee (discounted to $300 for your first year if you purchase by Sept. 30, 2017). Interested customers can sign up to be notified when Jamboard is available to order.

Jamboard

Integrating G Suite with services that businesses use every day

We built G Suite to be a workforce platform, not just a set of apps. Just as our apps work well together, they also need to work well with other services that employees rely on in their workflows. This is why we provide ways to integrate across our suite in Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Cloud Search. Today, we continue this effort by introducing Gmail Add-ons, a new way to integrate powerful enterprise workflows with Gmail; uniquely, our Add-ons are triggered by the context of the email.

Add-ons make it easy for developers to bring third-party applications into Gmail. Developers simply write an integration once, and it will work in the Gmail apps on Android, iOS and the web right away. Gmail users will be able to install Add-ons via the G Suite Marketplace later this year. Intuit, Salesforce and ProsperWorks are already working on Gmail Add-ons, and we encourage other interested developers to sign up today for our Developer Preview.

Intuit

Last fall, we announced efforts with Salesforce to build tighter integrations with G Suite apps, and starting today, businesses can use Edit Opportunities in Google Sheets to save time. Sales reps can simply sync a Salesforce Opportunity List View to Sheets to bulk edit data, and the changes are synced automatically to Salesforce, no upload required. This integration supports business logic and validation rules and even lets sales reps use Explore in Sheets to help answer natural language questions.

Moving beyond productivity with Google’s machine intelligence

Beyond meeting enterprise needs, we have been looking to the future by regularly adding machine intelligence innovations throughout our G Suite products. For example, Explore in Sheets lets you skip complex formulas and ask questions in a natural language, Calendar Find a Time intelligently avoids scheduling conflicts and suggests alternatives, and Quick Access in Drive (which starting today also works with Team Drives on iOS and Android devices, and is coming soon to the web) uses context to automatically surface the most relevant files you need.

And we’re using this machine intelligence to fix daily frustrations like scheduling meetings, too. Today, as a part of Hangouts Chat, we introduced @meet, an intelligent bot that automates the scheduling of meetings. With all of the variables and options, this can be a tedious task for people to perform, but it’s simple for the bot. @meet will be available for customers that sign up for the EAP of  Hangouts Chat.

bot image

Learn more

Today marks our continued commitment to moving enterprises beyond productivity. To learn more, you can read about the announcements for Drive, Hangouts, and Gmail Add-ons. If you’re a G Suite customer, we encourage you to sign up for the Drive File Stream and Hangouts Chat EAPs.

Meet the new Hangouts

Last year, we talked about doubling down on our enterprise focus for Hangouts and our commitment to building communication tools focused on the way teams work: from anywhere, at anytime. More than half of the workforce will contribute remotely by 2020, so businesses require purpose-built tools to help employees succeed. Our customers have told us it should be effortless for them to connect over video and that chat should be more collaborative, so we’re evolving Hangouts to focus on two experiences that help bring teams together and keep work moving forward: Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat.

Start your meetings with a quick click: meet Hangouts Meet

Hangouts Meet is a new video meeting experience with one goal: make joining meetings effortless so that people can be as productive as they are when they’re face-to-face. We've consistently heard from customers about ways we can improve Hangouts, like making it easier to work with external clients or reducing the ‘time to start’ a meeting to zero. That's why we've built Hangouts Meet to have a light, fast interface and smart participant management.

Hangouts

Running 30-person video conferences smoothly is easy with Meet. Simply start your meetings with a shared link — no accounts, plugins, downloads or hassles. Meet provides a place for everyone to join from Calendar, an email invite or an ad-hoc share. If you’re dialing in from a conference room, your laptop or using the dedicated mobile app, just a few clicks and you’re in.

Braintree, a PayPal service, has been using Hangouts Meet over the past three months to connect employees across board rooms, meeting rooms, breakout spaces and offices. "Based on initial use, Hangouts Meet is one of the most frictionless video conferencing systems we’ve experienced,” says Jerome Knapp, Manager of Systems Administration at Braintree. “Starting a meeting or sharing a document from the web, calendar invite or meeting room involves a single click. It’s an antidote to the VC fatigue that’s stopped my users and executives from taking full advantage of other systems.”

With Meet, native, full-screen presenting makes it easy to showcase your team’s projects. And as Meet integrates directly with G Suite, information you need about each meeting is automatically pulled from Calendar. For our G Suite Enterprise customers, each meeting comes with a dedicated dial-in phone number, so team members on the road can feel connected and productive in meetings despite wi-fi or data issues.

Hangouts Meet is one of the most frictionless video conferencing systems we’ve experienced. Jerome Knapp Systems Administration at Braintree

Bring your teams together on projects: introducing Hangouts Chat

Hangouts Chat is an intelligent communication app for teams that takes direct messaging in Hangouts and evolves it to reflect the way modern teams talk business.

Working on a project means bringing cross-functional teams together, discussing tasks that need to get done and sharing your work. Chat is built with exactly this in mind.

GIF

Dedicated, virtual rooms create a lasting home for each project, with threaded conversations so your team’s progress is easy to follow. Chat’s deep integration with G Suite means shared content from Drive and Docs, or photos and videos can be viewed directly in conversations. And powerful, filterable search in Chat makes it easy to find all your content dating back to the start of the project.

Chat is built not only to reflect the way teams work, but to provide a platform for the enterprise tools they work with. The Hangouts Chat platform supports a wide range of capabilities — from bots to simple scripting using Google App Script — and integrates with third-party applications so teams can do more right from within the conversation. Some companies we’re teaming up with to build out the platform include: Asana, Box, Prosperworks and Zendesk. And to make workflows even easier, Chat features @meet, an intelligent bot built on top of the Hangouts platform that uses natural language processing and machine learning to automatically schedule meetings for your team with Hangouts Meet and Google Calendar.

ahoy

Hangouts Meet is generally available today and will gradually roll out to all G Suite customers over the next few weeks. G Suite customers can apply to try Hangouts Chat through the Early Adopter Program.  

Powering enterprise productivity and secure collaboration with major updates to G suite

The promise of the cloud has always been to offer flexibility, access and security at a scale that’s unimaginable in legacy enterprise productivity solutions. Your data and applications offer the most value when they live in a connected cloud, and when combined with Google’s machine intelligence, they offer insights that can move your business beyond productivity.

In order for Google to deliver on this cloud promise, we must not only meet enterprise companies where they are today in terms of security, compliance, and connectivity standards — but also raise the bar for what’s possible with our advanced machine intelligence capabilities. That’s why we introduced G Suite. In the past year, we’ve launched more than 300 features and updates to help customers reach their cloud potential. And today, at Google Cloud Next, we announced the next generation of our collaboration and communication tools, designed to help our customers take it to the next level:

  • A Google Drive tailor-made for the enterprise
  • An evolved Hangouts purpose-built for teams: Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat
  • An Add-ons platform to integrate Gmail with the applications customers use every day
  • @meet, a machine learning-powered bot that uses natural language to schedule meetings

Introducing Team Drives and fresh features for enterprises in Drive

Since the launch of Google Drive, we’ve focused on making it simple for people to easily store, share and access their files. With more than 800 million active users on the Drive platform, we’re thrilled to see Drive delivering on this promise. These days, we’re focused on ensuring Drive addresses the unique needs of our enterprise customers, like compliance, data security and file ownership when teams change.

Today, we announced key enhancements in Drive to do just that:

  • Team Drives work the way people in enterprises do: in groups, not just as individuals. Team Drives enable teams to simply and securely manage permissions, ownership, and file access for an organization. Team Drives are generally available today for G Suite Business, Education, and Enterprise customers.
  • Drive File Stream allows employees to access tremendous amounts of cloud storage content directly from their desktops, without requiring a sync or monopolizing hard drive space. G Suite customers can apply for the Early Adopter Program (EAP) today.
  • Google Vault for Drive gains additional controls so admins can manage retention and legal hold policies. Google Vault for Drive is generally available today for G Suite Business, Education and Enterprise customers.
  • AppBridge, a partner that we’ve worked with closely for years, will be joining the G Suite team. We’re welcoming AppBridge to help our largest customers manage some of their most complex data migrations to Drive. 

Team Drives

Reimagining Hangouts and better brainstorming with Jamboard

We’re passionate about finding the best way for teams to work together and communicate, especially at large companies with workers around the world. Our customers have told us it should be effortless for them to connect over video and that chat should be more collaborative, which is why today we’re evolving Hangouts to focus on two new experiences: Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat.

Hangouts Meet is a new video meeting experience designed to make meetings frictionless. Up to 30 people can join a meeting within seconds — no downloads or browser plugins required, and it integrates with G Suite so you can present files natively. Anyone can join from any Android of iOS device, and a dial-in phone number for each meeting helps connect employees who are on the road without wifi/data. Meet is generally available today and will gradually roll out to all G Suite customers over the next few weeks.

Hangouts

Hangouts Chat offers teams a new way to connect with each other in virtual rooms, so they can keep work moving forward, even when they can’t meet face to face. With deep integrations with G Suite, teams can embed content right in the conversation, so they can interact and discuss items from Docs, Sheets, Slides, Calendar and other files. We also designed Chat to integrate with a wide set of enterprise tools, and we’re working with companies like Asana, Box and Zendesk to seamlessly integrate existing workflows into Chat. G Suite customers can apply to try Chat through the EAP.

Lastly, we introduced Jamboard in the early adopter program last fall to help teams move real-time collaboration upstream in the creative process. Today, we announced that Jamboard will enter general availability this May at a price of $4999 plus a $600 annual management and support fee (discounted to $300 for your first year if you purchase by Sept. 30, 2017). Interested customers can sign up to be notified when Jamboard is available to order.

Jamboard

Integrating G Suite with services that businesses use every day

We built G Suite to be a workforce platform, not just a set of apps. Just as our apps work well together, they also need to work well with other services that employees rely on in their workflows. This is why we provide ways to integrate across our suite in Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Cloud Search. Today, we continue this effort by introducing Gmail Add-ons, a new way to integrate powerful enterprise workflows with Gmail; uniquely, our Add-ons are triggered by the context of the email.

Add-ons make it easy for developers to bring third-party applications into Gmail. Developers simply write an integration once, and it will work in the Gmail apps on Android, iOS and the web right away. Gmail users will be able to install Add-ons via the G Suite Marketplace later this year. Intuit, Salesforce and ProsperWorks are already working on Gmail Add-ons, and we encourage other interested developers to sign up today for our Developer Preview.

Last fall, we announced efforts with Salesforce to build tighter integrations with G Suite apps, and starting today, businesses can use Edit Opportunities in Google Sheets to save time. Sales reps can simply export a Salesforce Opportunity List View to Sheets to bulk edit data, and the changes are synced automatically to Salesforce, no upload required. This integration supports business logic and validation rules and even lets sales reps use Explore in Sheets to help answer natural language questions.

Moving beyond productivity with Google’s machine intelligence

Beyond meeting enterprise needs, we have been looking to the future by regularly adding machine intelligence innovations throughout our G Suite products. For example, Explore in Sheets lets you skip complex formulas and ask questions in a natural language, Calendar Find a Time intelligently avoids scheduling conflicts and suggests alternatives, and Quick Access in Drive (which starting today also works with Team Drives on iOS and Android devices, and is coming soon to the web) uses context to automatically surface the most relevant files you need.

And we’re using this machine intelligence to fix daily frustrations like scheduling meetings, too. Today, as a part of Hangouts Chat, we introduced @meet, an intelligent bot that automates the scheduling of meetings. With all of the variables and options, this can be a tedious task for people to perform, but it’s simple for the bot. @meet will be available for customers that sign up for the EAP of  Hangouts Chat.

Learn more

Today marks our continued commitment to moving enterprises beyond productivity. To learn more, you can read about the announcements for Drive, Hangouts, and Gmail Add-ons. If you’re a G Suite customer, we encourage you to sign up for the Drive File Stream and Hangouts Chat EAPs.

Source: Gmail Blog


Powering enterprise productivity and secure collaboration with major updates to G suite

The promise of the cloud has always been to offer flexibility, access and security at a scale that’s unimaginable in legacy enterprise productivity solutions. Your data and applications offer the most value when they live in a connected cloud, and when combined with Google’s machine intelligence, they offer insights that can move your business beyond productivity.

In order for Google to deliver on this cloud promise, we must not only meet enterprise companies where they are today in terms of security, compliance, and connectivity standards — but also raise the bar for what’s possible with our advanced machine intelligence capabilities. That’s why we introduced G Suite. In the past year, we’ve launched more than 300 features and updates to help customers reach their cloud potential. And today, at Google Cloud Next, we announced the next generation of our collaboration and communication tools, designed to help our customers take it to the next level:

  • A Google Drive tailor-made for the enterprise
  • An evolved Hangouts purpose-built for teams: Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat
  • An Add-ons platform to integrate Gmail with the applications customers use every day
  • @meet, a machine learning-powered bot that uses natural language to schedule meetings

Introducing Team Drives and fresh features for enterprises in Drive

Since the launch of Google Drive, we’ve focused on making it simple for people to easily store, share and access their files. With more than 800 million active users on the Drive platform, we’re thrilled to see Drive delivering on this promise. These days, we’re focused on ensuring Drive addresses the unique needs of our enterprise customers, like compliance, data security and file ownership when teams change.

Today, we announced key enhancements in Driveto do just that:

  • Team Drives work the way people in enterprises do: in groups, not just as individuals. Team Drives enable teams to simply and securely manage permissions, ownership, and file access for an organization. Team Drives are generally available today for G Suite Business, Education, and Enterprise customers.
  • Drive File Stream allows employees to access tremendous amounts of cloud storage content directly from their desktops, without requiring a sync or monopolizing hard drive space. G Suite customers can apply for the Early Adopter Program (EAP) today.
  • Google Vault for Drive gains additional controls so admins can manage retention and legal hold policies. Google Vault for Drive is generally available today for G Suite Business, Education and Enterprise customers.
  • AppBridge, a partner that we’ve worked with closely for years, will be joining the G Suite team. We’re welcoming AppBridge to help our largest customers manage some of their most complex data migrations to Drive. 

Team Drives

Reimagining Hangouts and better brainstorming with Jamboard

We’re passionate about finding the best way for teams to work together and communicate, especially at large companies with workers around the world. Our customers have told us it should be effortless for them to connect over video and that chat should be more collaborative, which is why today we’re evolving Hangouts to focus on two new experiences: Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat.

Hangouts Meet is a new video meeting experience designed to make meetings frictionless. Up to 30 people can join a meeting within seconds — no downloads or browser plugins required, and it integrates with G Suite so you can present files natively. Anyone can join from any Android of iOS device, and a dial-in phone number for each meeting helps connect employees who are on the road without wifi/data. Meet is generally available today and will gradually roll out to all G Suite customers over the next few weeks.

Hangouts

Hangouts Chat offers teams a new way to connect with each other in virtual rooms, so they can keep work moving forward, even when they can’t meet face to face. With deep integrations with G Suite, teams can embed content right in the conversation, so they can interact and discuss items from Docs, Sheets, Slides, Calendar and other files. We also designed Chat to integrate with a wide set of enterprise tools, and we’re working with companies like Asana, Box and Zendesk to seamlessly integrate existing workflows into Chat. G Suite customers can apply to try Chat through the EAP.

Chat GIF

Lastly, we introduced Jamboard in the early adopter program last fall to help teams move real-time collaboration upstream in the creative process. Today, we announced that Jamboard will enter general availability this May at a price of $4999 plus a $600 annual management and support fee (discounted to $300 for your first year if you purchase by Sept. 30, 2017). Interested customers can sign up to be notified when Jamboard is available to order.

Jamboard

Integrating G Suite with services that businesses use every day

We built G Suite to be a workforce platform, not just a set of apps. Just as our apps work well together, they also need to work well with other services that employees rely on in their workflows. This is why we provide ways to integrate across our suite in Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Cloud Search. Today, we continue this effort by introducing Gmail Add-ons, a new way to integrate powerful enterprise workflows with Gmail; uniquely, our Add-ons are triggered by the context of the email.

Add-ons make it easy for developers to bring third-party applications into Gmail. Developers simply write an integration once, and it will work in the Gmail apps on Android, iOS and the web right away. Gmail users will be able to install Add-ons via the G Suite Marketplace later this year. Intuit, Salesforce and ProsperWorks are already working on Gmail Add-ons, and we encourage other interested developers to sign up today for our Developer Preview.

Intuit

Last fall, we announced efforts with Salesforce to build tighter integrations with G Suite apps, and starting today, businesses can use Edit Opportunities in Google Sheetsto save time. Sales reps can simply export a Salesforce Opportunity List View to Sheets to bulk edit data, and the changes are synced automatically to Salesforce, no upload required. This integration supports business logic and validation rules and even lets sales reps use Explore in Sheets to help answer natural language questions.

Moving beyond productivity with Google’s machine intelligence

Beyond meeting enterprise needs, we have been looking to the future by regularly adding machine intelligence innovations throughout our G Suite products. For example, Explore in Sheets lets you skip complex formulas and ask questions in a natural language, Calendar Find a Time intelligently avoids scheduling conflicts and suggests alternatives, and Quick Access in Drive (which starting today also works with Team Drives on iOS and Android devices, and is coming soon to the web) uses context to automatically surface the most relevant files you need.

And we’re using this machine intelligence to fix daily frustrations like scheduling meetings, too. Today, as a part of Hangouts Chat, we introduced @meet, an intelligent bot that automates the scheduling of meetings. With all of the variables and options, this can be a tedious task for people to perform, but it’s simple for the bot. @meet will be available for customers that sign up for the EAP of  Hangouts Chat.

bot image

Learn more

Today marks our continued commitment to moving enterprises beyond productivity. To learn more, you can read about the announcements for Drive, Hangouts, and Gmail Add-ons. If you’re a G Suite customer, we encourage you to sign up for the Drive File Stream and Hangouts Chat EAPs.

Source: Gmail Blog


Q&A: Fontana Gruppo – Special Fasteners tightens up global operations with G Suite

Editor’s note: We spoke to Alberto Fontana, Owner and Global Operations Director of Fontana Gruppo - Special Fasteners, about the company’s growth strategy and how it’s supported by G Suite collaboration tools. Founded in 1952, Fontana Gruppo - Special Fasteners is one of the world’s leading producers of industrial fasteners. The Fontana family business has more than 4,100 employees, 19 production plants on four continents, and an annual turnover of $1billion.

Why did you choose Google Cloud’s G Suite to help you grow?

In 2014, our annual turnover doubled when we bought one of our main competitors. This helped us expand pretty rapidly. Today, we have factories in Italy, Mexico, Brazil, India and the United States, and we produce more than 10 billion industrial fasteners per year. This rapid global expansion brought fresh challenges we needed to overcome: we had two separate email solutions, our on-premise server system felt outdated, and different locations were using different IT systems. We looked for ways to unify the company and G Suite was a perfect fit.

How was the migration process to G Suite?

With outstanding assistance from Innext, our Global Change Management Service Partner, we began moving 14 terabytes of files from our servers onto Drive. We wanted our teams to choose G Suite rather than to be forced to make the change, and within just six months, all 4,100 of our staff had Google accounts and Gmail. Data migration was only a part of the whole “Project Innovation” we undertook with Innext, whose team of Google Cloud credentialed trainers educated our people on G Suite features and best practices.

How did G Suite impact your office-based teams?

Staff at our 19 sites can now work together simultaneously on single, continually-saved documents using Docs or Sheets. No more worrying about having the wrong version or losing information when people fail to save. On top of that, management now has oversight on up-to-the-minute progress, and can leave feedback in clear and simple comments.

How have your factory teams benefited from G Suite?

Our factory staff surprised us by using G Suite in interesting ways. One example is they use  Sheets as an alternative ). The staff installed large screens in the factory on which operators can upload information on a live Sheet, such as daily goals and progress in real-time.

How has this helped your teams work together across borders?

With G Suite, our managers now use mobile devices more than desktop or laptop computers, even when they’re offline, so that they can stay in touch when they’re visiting sites and clients. At the same time, Hangouts has reduced unnecessary travel, and meetings are easier to arrange on Calendar and at our facilities with Chromebox for Meetings.

How do you make sure everything's running smoothly?

Unlike with our on-premise servers, we never experience outages or have to spend time on maintenance. For staff feedback, Forms is ideal for collecting vital data from our sales team and global HR.

Can you tell us about your experience with Google’s security and compliance?

Following a discussion with James Snow, Head of Google Data Security, we’re convinced that Google’s security meets our needs, and is certainly better than our previous servers. One major benefit is that we can partition our information and share it with third parties, such as auditors.

What’s next for Fontana Gruppo - Special Fasteners?

Beyond universal adoption of G Suite in our Italian HQ and in our foreign branches, we keep improving our new “collaboration and communication experience” by evaluating new initiatives provided by Innext, like our CSS project and customized Transformation Labs. It’s our intention to be more than the biggest industrial fastener company — we want to be the most innovative, too. And because G Suite is regularly updated, we know Google will keep us ahead of the curve.

Source: Google Cloud