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.”
Introducing Team Drives and fresh features for enterprises in Drive
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.
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.
AppBridge, a partner that we’ve worked with closely for years, 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.
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.
Google built G Suite to be a workforce platform, not just a set of apps. Just as Google apps work well together, they also need to work well with other services that employees rely on in their workflows. This is why 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.
Add-ons make it easy for developers to bring third-party applications into Gmail. Developers simply write an integration once, and it will work in the Gmail apps on Android, iOS and the web right away. Gmail users will be able to install Add-ons via the G Suite Marketplace later this year. Intuit, Salesforce and ProsperWorks are already working on Gmail Add-ons, and Google encourages other interested developers to sign up today for our Developer Preview.
