New offerings will further power enterprise productivity and secure collaboration
On the second day of the Cloud Next ‘17, Google announced major updates to 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’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.”
Since the launch of Google Drive, the company has 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, Google is thrilled to see Drive delivering on this promise. Google is focused 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. 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.
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. Anyone can join from any Android or 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 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 Zendeskto seamlessly integrate existing workflows into Chat. G Suite customers can apply to try Chat through the EAP.
Lastly, Google Introduced Jamboard in the early adopter program last fall to help teams move real-time collaboration upstream in the creative process. Jamboard will enter general availability this May.
Prabhakar Raghavan, further added, “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.”
