G Suite Series - Hangouts Chat & Meet

Companies understand the pain of hosting meetings with individuals outside their physical office space. Issues like weak signals, faulty plug-ins, and jammed telephone lines are often culprits for a 'less than pleasant' meeting experience.

Google understands this naturally, and innovated a solution. Their most recent update to Google Hangouts split it into two parts; Chat and Meet. Both consist of new features aimed to make the audio and visual communications between users, more convenient and direct. Chat and Meet, in a way, can be looked at as business counterparts to Google's consumer apps, Allo and Duo.

Here's what you need to know about Chat and Meet:

Hangouts Chat
If you're familiar with Slack, this is more or less Google's version of it but with superior conversation threading. Google Chat makes it easier to bring cross-functional teams together, discuss tasks that need to get done, and share collaborative work. It's designed to allow users to create virtual rooms where they can hold group conversations, and even break off into tangential threads. Available soon on Android, iOS, and web, it's perfect for practically anyone, on any device, anywhere.

Chat’s deep integration with G Suite means shared content from Drive and Docs, or photos and videos, can be viewed directly in conversations. It even includes filterable search to make it easy to find content dating back to the start of a project. The Chat platform supports a wide range of capabilities, from bots to simple scripting using Google App Script. It also integrates with third-party applications so teams can do more right from within the conversation. Chat also 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
The purpose of Google’s Hangouts Meet is to ease the process of starting a meeting, essentially eliminating the need for plug-ins and sign-ins. It's meant to kick-start a video conference using nothing more than a browser with a shared link, calendar invite, or an ad-hoc share. Unfortunately it's common to find cumbersome perquisites when simply attempting to join a meeting with other video conferencing software. Meet's primary goal is to make joining meetings effortless so that users can be as productive as they are when they're face-to-face.

Hangouts Meet allows up to 30 participants as opposed to only 10 in the earlier Hangouts version. What's even cooler is that with every meeting, a dial-in number containing a PIN code for instant access is provided for a frictionless experience. It's super easy to dial in from a conference room, laptop, or a mobile device using the dedicated app. Meet is available to all G Suite editions, however, the ability to create meetings with a dial-in phone number is only available in the Enterprise tier of G Suite. Here's how to manage meet for you organization and a handy cheat sheet to help you get started.

It's clear that Google is committed 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 their employees succeed. As to why Google decided to evolve Hangouts into 2 solutions, it's probably an aim to deliver an easier approach for the two main entry-points that customers adhere to; collaborative messaging and video meetings.

Click here to see what you can do with the newest features of Hangouts. To learn more about Hangouts Chat or Meet, get in touch with us today!

G Suite Series - Google Hangouts

From Google Hangouts to Google Drive, in this series we'll cover all the major applications that simplify business practices and help optimize business efficiency and productivity.

Google Hangouts - if you have ever used Gmail you have definitely heard of Hangout's and know that it's some sort of messaging application from Google. You're right, but there's so much more it can offer, especially for businesses.

Hangout's unifies chats, audio calls, and video meetings across all of your user's devices. Regardless of whether they're in Gmail, on the desktop, or on Andoid/iOS devices, your users won't miss a thing because all their Hangouts are synchronized. Through HD video, voice, and text, it helps connect you with people that make your business run.

Many companies have been able to cut down on travel costs, simply with Hangouts. When you can have face-to-face interactions via technology with your team, your customers, or even your prospects, you don't need to spend valuable time and money on travel. In some cases, Google Hangouts can even help your business save tons of money on phone and conferencing services which can be invested in other, more important aspects of the business.

Hangouts offers many of the advanced unified communications features included in some of the most robust business phone systems. So what are some of these features that Google Hangouts has to offer?

Connect with anyone, individually, or in a group, anytime and anywhere: You can host Hangouts for up to 25 people within or outside of your organization. The screen automatically focuses on whoever is speaking and intelligently mutes others to prevent background noises - it's seamless.

Easy to use from anywhere: Your entire team can join the same Hangout from their desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone with the same easy-to-use experience. Hangouts can be accessed via multiple ways including Gmail from the browser, the desktop app (for Chrome OS and Windows), the browser plugin, the mobile app (Andoid/iOS), the Hangouts website, and Google+.

Built-in screen sharing: Make a live presentation of your latest slides or give a remote tutorial with easy screen sharing, and send useful links with built in chat.

Have external participants join a Hangouts session: Even if they don't have a G Suite account you can invite external participants to join your session. You can even dial out to any telephone number for free in North America to add them to the conference audio. To ensure privacy, you also have the option to restrict Hangouts by default to those only within your organization.

These are a few key features that Google Hangouts has to offer making it an excellent cloud solution for your business communication. If you find Hangouts lacks some important capabilities, there are third-party platforms like Business Hangouts that can significantly expand the functionality of Hangouts to your needs. If that still isn't enough, there are numerous third-party solutions like UberConference - a cloud-based solution that integrates with Hangouts to add true telephone dial-in based audio-conferencing functionality.

With a G Suite subscription, you not only get incredible applications like Hangouts but you also get the latest and greatest features Google continues to improve upon. Go to the G Suite learning center to learn more about Google Hangouts and be sure to contact us at InterlockIT. We'd be happy to assist you in learning how to use G Suite effectively for your specific business needs.