Software
Gmail integrates Google Chat, Rooms, and Meet to support Microsoft and Slack.
True to Google's knack for only revealing stuff just after they leaked out, the company announced a massive overhaul of Gmail for G Suite enterprise customers ahead of next week's Google Cloud meeting. The app is no longer called "Gmail" because it is a single app for all of Google's networking platforms: Gmail, Speak, Meetings, and Meet.
It will be available as a "early access demo" for G Suite customers this week and will be rolled out to all G Suite customers later this year. As for the user edition of Gmail, it appears like nothing will improve in the near term. Google says it's "actively thinking about how and where to bring the experience to customers who may like it."
Javier Soltero, who went to Google last November with a goal to clean up all of this, calls it a "integrated workplace" that will make it easier for staff to switch through these various forms of contact without getting confused. So, for example, one day the chat box that already exists in the Google Doc or Google Meet window will not be an entirely random box, but rather would be combined with the other chats or rooms.
Right now, though, the biggest change is only placing these tools in the same device (on your phone) or browser (on your desktop). There will be less jumping between the tabs and applications of the browser. In one example , users on the desktop would be able to get a chat view in one column, a doc view in another, and a Google Meet video chat in both columns.
Although there are some ties in Gmail to these other goods right now, this is more like a wholesale integration. It's the next logical move for Google after it moved Google Meet to Gmail last May.
Putting all of these various contact channels into a single app has an added benefit: setting the status of Do Not Interrupt for all of them as well as muting their alerts in one location. You will also be able to search for conversations as quickly as you can search for Gmail. Google says that these integrations allow users to "quickly connect to a video call from a chat, forward a chat message to your inbox,[or] create a task from a chat message."
Google is also working to make other teamwork projects a little simpler. For eg, the difference between Chat and Rooms is a little blurry before you know that Rooms are intended to be more permanent places to address projects.
Google applies lightweight versions of other G Suite items to Rooms: each of them would have their own areas for delegated tasks and data.
Just as Microsoft is using its Office 365 supremacy to encourage its customers to join teams, Google is simply using Gmail 's success to move out its own teamwork resources. For G Suite customers who want to completely live inside Google's software ecosystem, new integrations will make it easier to coordinate their joint work. For everyone else, it may end up being a set of unwanted add-ons that are increasingly difficult to avoid.
Changes move G Suite to being solely about Google Docs, and pivots to being solely about Google Collaboration Resources. G Suite has a lot of items with overlapping features: Docs, Sheets, Chat, Meet, Tasks, Keep, Drive, and Gmail all have little bits of each other combined, so it's all too easy to get lost.
"The history of these products is that they were all built individually," says Soltero, "and they all had a core set of views that were clear to everyone: multi-user, user collaboration, etc .... They all had the same collection of common thoughts, but they didn't really move toward a common end target.
The aim is now much clearer: to make G Suite 's communications apps the focal point and the guiding principle for all those other products. Outlook tabs are mail, search / files, and calendar. All the tabs for Gmail are about contact devices. It's a move that's specifically aimed to both Microsoft Teams and Slack. Google 's goal is to be at the forefront of a modern interpretation of what a productivity suite is — but many other companies are actually doing the same thing.
