In the workplace communication arena, most people use a combination of various services, whether Skype, Slack, Teams or Google Hangouts, to communicate internally and externally.
Last week, Google announced a push to shore up its own offering, splitting Hangouts into two main products: Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat.
Available now, Hangouts Meet is a video platform designed to let users easily create and join video meetings.
Hangouts Meet can power video conference calls with up to 30 people, and you join the meetings simply by clicking a link that has been shared with you, perhaps through Calendar or sent via email.
G Suite Enterprise customers can also join the meetings with a dedicated dial-in phone number, if they are without wifi or mobile data.
Jerome Knapp, Manager of Systems Administration at Braintree, which has been trialling the tool, said: “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.”
The second product is Hangouts Chat, a Slack-style communication tool for teams.
Users can create virtual chat rooms for different projects, laid out in a threaded conversation format.
You can also easily share things from Drive or Google Docs, and perform filtered searches across projects.
In a blog post, Google also said Hangouts Chat would support third-party integrations, and it was working with platforms like Asana, Box, Prosperworks and Zendesk.
Unlike Hangouts Meet, which is already available, Hangouts Chat is not publicly live yet, but G Suite customers can apply to try Hangouts Chat through the Early Adopter Program.