The team communication app of Google is reportedly going to be made available for customers of its G Suite portfolio of cloud productivity apps. The announcement that came this Wednesday, states that it is expected to be done within this week.
Applications like Slack, and Microsoft Teams, which are part of the Office 365 portfolio, have become quite popular these days. With the Google Hangouts Chat app, Google looks forward to competing with them. This will mark the very first time Google would introduce some sort of text-based collaboration service in the past year. Last time, it was the Hangouts Chat as well. But back then, it was made available, via an early adopter program, only to a very small number of customers. As of now, more than $1 billion in revenue is generated by Google just from the G Suite and the Google Cloud Platform. The G Suite contains email, cloud file sharing, video conferencing, and other services.
The Hangouts Chat allows multiple users, at once, to type out updates to each other. It lets the users make calls to integrate with services like Salesforce, and Trello whenever required. Google Calendar and Google Drive can also be accessed directly from Hangouts Chat.
Scott Johnston, Director of Product Management at Google, said they are designing the Hangouts Chat for big companies. It will be capable of supporting a massive 8000 users. It will support 28 languages as well. It will be made available on all three platforms, Android, iOS, and the web.
Scott Johnston was previously involved with the Google Drive project.
Companies that are already paying for G Suite will get the Hangouts Chat for free. Unlike Slack, in Hangouts Chat, people not working at these aforementioned companies will not be able to use the free tier.
