Google updates its G Suite

Google has majorly updated its G Suite offering. A Google Drive tailor-made for the enterprise, evolved Hangouts purpose-built for teams: Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat, Add-ons platform to integrate Gmail with the applications customers use every day and meet, a machine learning-powered bot that uses natural language to schedule meetings.

Prabhakar Raghavan, Vice-President, APPS, Google Cloud, said, “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 is possible with our advanced machine intelligence capabilities. That is 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.”

Since the launch of Google Drive, the company has focussed 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, Google is thrilled to see Drive delivering on this promise. Google is focussed on ensuring Drive addresses the unique needs of our enterprise customers, like compliance, data security and file ownership when teams change.

The key enhancements announced in Drive are:

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.

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 will be joining the G Suite team. Google is welcoming AppBridge to help our largest customers manage some of their most complex data migrations to Drive.

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 one can present files natively.

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. Google also designed Chat to integrate with a wide set of enterprise tools, and is 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.

Google provide ways to integrate across our suite in Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Cloud Search. Today, Google continues 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.

Google has been looking to the future by regularly adding machine intelligence innovations throughout our G Suite products.