As office workers continue to grapple with a proliferation of SaaS applications, IT administrators fear being locked into a single application or a closed environment. By tackling the problem head-on, Google is well on its way to further bridging the gap between employees and their preferred work tools through expanding third-party integrations on its Workplace platform.
Ensuring apps from different vendors work well together is key to helping teams and organizations maximize hybrid working, and the new additions to the Workplace platform recently announced by Google were designed with this in mind.
New additions include the launch of third-party smart chips in Docs, as well as new integrations and enhanced API capabilities for Meet, Chat, and Spaces, all of which aim to provide new ways to use third-party apps in or with Google Work space. .
In its next conference call last week, Google said Meet had added nearly a dozen new features to facilitate what Google calls "immersive connections," while new security updates see some Enterprise Plus and Education customers receive encryption. Client Side (CSE) in Gmail and Google Docs.
Speaking about post-conference announcements, Yulie Kwon Kim, vice president of product management for Google Workspace, said that Google is committed to providing customers with personalization in the way they work with our tools.
"Opening up our platform brings work together in one place, allowing the people closest to you to really tailor it to their likings, and workflows really transcend products," Kim said. "So a simple workflow to get your tasks done can cover not just multiple workspace apps, but also tools from other vendors, as well as internal tools.
Smart chips improve application integration
One of the key new additions to the Workspace platform is the expansion of what Google calls smart bullets: embedded links that users can add in Google Docs by typing the @ symbol, part of the smart canvas concept launched last year.
Smart Canvas was designed to simplify the way Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides work together. It gave Workspace users the ability to bring the people and information they needed into Docs through simple @-mentions, creating interactive mentions of people, files, meetings, and models.
Google has now extended its smart chip capabilities to its ecosystem partners, allowing users to add even richer data, more context, and critical information directly into their workflow. With these new third-party smart chips, customers will be able to tag and view important partner app information using @-mentions and embed interactive information and third-party app previews directly into a Google Document.
Kim said that by opening up the smart canvas to third-party apps and announcing new APIs, it would make it easier for developers to build directly in Meet, Chat and Spaces.
“We're already seeing a lot of momentum around how people customize their tools in Workspace. Today, there are more than 5200 public apps on our Marketplace and more than 5000 billion apps installed on Google Workspace,” he said.
Several organizations have already confirmed that they are developing third-party smart chip integrations, including AO Docs, Atlassian, Asana, Figma, Miro, Tableau, and ZenDesk. These smart chips for third-party integrations will be available to customers in 2023.
Open ecosystem approach helps combat SaaS proliferation
Atlassian is one of the organizations that creates smart bullet points for its Jira and Confluence apps, allowing users to visualize key project plan details directly in a document.
Erika Trautman, product manager for work management at Atlassian, said Atlassian is investing in Confluence and JIRA integration so users can access Atlassian products directly within Google products. These integrations will start by making it easier to access JIRA statements and Confluence pages in Google Docs, and are expected to go live early next year.
"We're seeing users apply Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and smart links in Trello at scale, so this type of cross-product integration makes a lot of sense to us," Trautman said. Trello, a subsidiary of Atlassian, makes a collaborative work management app of the same name.
Trautman added that with the proliferation of software tools that now exist in most organizations, it's up to technology companies to help their customers minimize disruption resulting from the constant need to switch contexts and make things easier for users. endings. access the tools they need while they work.
"We need to meet people with the characteristics they want, where they are, and not insist that they go to different destinations," Trautman said. "Find them where they are and provide the tools and integrations while helping administrators of these large enterprises deal with the complexity of the multitude of applications their employees need, simplifying administration and making sure everything is secure.
Kim said that by opening up Google's innovations to external partners, Google Workspace becomes a "connective tissue for the best tools."
Over 300 new features
Kim said that to keep up with changes and meet changing customer needs, Google delivered 300 new collaboration-focused updates to customers this year alone.
Other updates announced by Google last week indicate that there are no plans to slow this down.
Google Meet has gone through what the company describes as a reinvention, expanding third-party features that users can access directly in Meet, along with Docs, Sheets, and Slides.
Google also announced two new developer tools, the Google Meet API and the Google Meet Companion SDK, which will allow users to link third-party apps to Google Meet.
Otherwise, Google has added a featured speaker in Slides; adaptive framing with AI-powered cameras from Huddly and Logitech; registration in the meeting room; mobile buddy mode in Meet; the ability to assign conference rooms to meeting rooms in Meet; automatic video framing; automatic meeting transcripts; and the ability to control slides directly in Meet. Some of these additions will be available next month, while most will be available to customers from 2023.
Users will also have access to work reminders in Google Calendar and personalized emojis and chat in Google Chat starting this month, as well as exclusive chat spaces in Google Chat starting in early 2023.
As for updated security measures, in addition to CSE, new Data Loss Prevention (DLP) features for Chat allow administrators to create custom policies to help prevent sensitive information from being leaked, while Trust Rules in Drive will allow more granular control of internal and external data. data. Share. All of these capabilities will be available by the end of the year.
Copyright © 2022 IDG Communications, Inc.