Google's Hangouts Meet to work with other video conferencing systems

Google on Monday announced a series of updates to G Suite, making the bundle of productivity tools easier to use with other major third-party enterprise tools.

Interoperability is an important feature for cloud services, given the number of different services and products that can be found in just one office. According to one assessment, the average employee actively uses 36 cloud services at work.

The G Suite updates start with Hangouts Meet, the enterprise version of Google's video chat tool, which will be interoperable with other video conferencing tools. Whether they're using Microsoft Skype for Business, Polycom or Cisco, a user can now join Hangouts Meet video calls as fully-featured Meet participants.

Additionally, in the coming months, business users on Google's messaging service Hangouts Chat will be able to invite people from outside of their organization, such as clients or vendors, to join conversations.

Google is also rolling out support for third-party conferencing natively in Google Calendar. In the coming months, several different third-party conferencing add-ons will be available in the G Suite Marketplace, including add-ons from Cisco Webex, Arkadin, GoToMeeting, LogMeIn, Dialpad, RingCentral, Vidyo and Vonage. With the add-ons, users can simply click on a link in a Google Calendar invite to join a conference on web or mobile.

Additionally, building on prior integrations with Microsoft Exchange, Google is now enabling Google Calendar users to book resources like rooms and equipment in Microsoft Exchange.

Google is also making Google Sheets interoperable with SAP, enabling customers to directly import ERP content into Google Sheets.