JEFFREY HOEHL: Hi, everyone.
My name is Jeffrey Hoehl, and I'm
a Product Manager on G Suite.
I'm here with my colleague, Jon Harmer,
another Product Manager on G Suite.
We'd like to talk with you today on how
you can use G Suite together with all
of your favorite applications, including Microsoft tools.
But first, let's look at how work gets done today.
Professionals have access to dozens of applications
in their organization.
In fact, the average large company
uses 129 different applications to get work done.
Apps like DocuSign, Box, or Trello
can simplify individual processes and drive businesses
to adopt newer ways of work.
It's really great that there seems
to be an app specifically designed for what we
need to get done for each task.
But there's a downside of this proliferation of apps.
The flood of notifications and disconnected
processes frustrates users.
Our work is spread across more apps than ever before, which
inevitably leads to lots of apps switching,
and reduces our ability to focus.
Context-switching between applications
cuts into time spent on value-additive work.
In fact, research shows that users
are losing 32 days per year just navigating
between their day-to-day applications.
But not to worry.
We have solutions to help solve these problems.
G Suite was designed to work seamlessly
with the apps your team already uses.
We know that teams require applications beyond G Suite.
Apps from Slack, DocuSign, Salesforce, and Microsoft.
Workers need a single, intuitive platform
that lets them use their favorite tools
without context-switching.
Businesses need a platform that integrates seamlessly
with their existing software stack,
while administrators want it simple enough to service
and manage.
So what we're here to talk to you about today
are two areas of how we've seen our user base
work in other applications.
First, how does G Suite interoperate,
and how does it coexist with Microsoft?
Second, how can G Suite integrate
with other applications in your broader ecosystem,
extending G Suite with the tools that you already have?
Let's start with G Suite interoperability.
On the G Suite team, interoperability means
designed to work together.
We've designed G Suite to work seamlessly
together with your existing or previous tools.
To break down the problem, when we designed G Suite to work
together with those other tools, we
were thinking about three different pillars.
The first is migration.
Once an organization decides to go G Suite,
we help them move off of legacy systems.
We offer many data migration products,
like G Suite Migrate and G Suite migration
from Microsoft Exchange.
That enable enterprise customers to easily move
their on-premise or other cloud data into G Suite.
We also have change management resources
to make the whole process as smooth as possible.
The second pillar is internal coexistence.
Depending on your rollout strategy and your deployment
goals, there will often be times where both Microsoft and Google
tools are used simultaneously, whether that be
within your team or throughout your organization.
We want to make sure our apps and services work
great and coexist with Microsoft in all those use cases.
A great example of this is when teams sign up for our new G
Suite Essential additions.
G Suite Essentials provides Google Meet, Drive, Docs,
Sheets, Slides, as well as many other tools,
for teams that want to use the best of modern collaboration
within an organization that may have existing email
and calendar solutions already in place.
Our third pillar is external coexistence.
We know that you're likely always going
to have to work with some external vendors,
or contractors, or clients that still use Microsoft tools.
G Suite interoperates with your external partners too,
so you don't have to worry about who uses what.
Today, we'll be focused on the internal and external
coexistence pillars, and how G Suite products are
designed to interoperate.
The bottom line is that G Suite works seamlessly
with Microsoft tools.
So you can adopt G Suite without worrying about coexistence
with your existing data, tools, or infrastructure.
So what does that mean for content collaboration?
When collaborating together, we know
you often have to work with files that were previously
created before you moved to G Suite,
or by team members still using Microsoft tools.
Rather than changing these file formats,
when you open in Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides,
you have the ability to edit the file as an Office file
directly, right away.
There goes that worrisome conversion.
For example, you can open an Excel file directly
in Google Sheets.
We preserve the original Excel format
even as you make changes.
When you share the file in Drive with others on your team,
they can use the tool of their choice
to continue to make those edits.
There are no special tools you need to convert the file
format, and there are no duplicate copies
in different formats in your drive.
You can even edit Office files on a machine that doesn't have
Microsoft installed at all.
But we don't just make it easy to edit your existing
content in G Suite, we also supercharge that content
with the power of Google collaboration.
Doc, Sheets, and Slides helped pioneer real-time collaboration
to create shared living documents in the cloud.
Documents in G Suite become a single source of truth,
so everyone can stay on the same page,
and everyone knows where the latest changes are.
You can see the presence of your teammates
as they update documents in real-time with the colored
cursors moving as they type.
Data changes in real-time, and there's
live comments and suggestions.
With Office Editing in Docs, Sheets, and Slides,
we bring the power of real-time collaboration
to your Microsoft Office documents.
In Drive, you can also comment and collaborate on files,
including PDFs.
You get your best work done together,
and we provide the power of collaboration
to your existing files seamlessly.
But that's not all.
Over the years, we have evolved Docs, Sheets, and Slides
to be suggestive, interactive, and connected,
to help you save time.
With Office Editing, we bring the power of Google Artificial
Intelligence to your files to help you write faster and more
accurately.
This year, we introduced Smart Compose in Google Docs.
Just like in Gmail, it makes writing
faster and higher-quality by suggesting complete sentences
from your thoughts as you type them out.
We also add intelligent grammar suggestions,
powered by machine learning and neural networks,
and can now autocorrect common spelling mistakes.
Interoperability with Microsoft doesn't
stay within Docs, and Sheets, and Slides, and Drive.
We're continually working on ways
to make working with your existing files even easier,
wherever you receive them and wherever you are.
We're excited to make it easier to edit your files directly
from within Gmail.
You can quickly begin editing and collaborating
on Office documents when you receive them via email
by clicking the Edit in Google Docs button, which opens them
directly for editing.
We're also bringing the power of collaboration
and artificial intelligence to your mobile devices.
You can now edit Office documents on your Android
devices and have them--
have the same real-time collaboration features
and Office Editing features as you do on desktop.
With our optimized mobile experience,
you can easily consume and take action on your documents
while you're on the go.
Now let's talk a bit about communications
with the rest of your team.
If part of your organization is still
using Outlook, with a simple one-time initial setup
via the Google Calendar Interop Tool by your IT Administrator,
users on both systems will able to see
each other's availability in real-time, including
free and busy information, and full event details.
Exchange resource booking in Google Calendar
also allows G Suite users to benefit
from Calendar's Intelligent Room Booking System,
even if the conference rooms are stored in Exchange.
You'll be able to view free/busy status for rooms,
filter them by availability, search for them by name,
and even get personalized suggestions.
Calendar Interop supports Office 365, Exchange 2010, Exchange
2013, and Exchange 2016.
If you want to use Meet for video conferencing
alongside your existing email and calendar solutions,
the Meet Outlook add-in makes it easy to schedule, join,
and create Meet video meetings directly from within Outlook.
Teams and organizations can start
using Meet today as part of G Suite essentials,
and get up-and-running in a short amount of time.
No email or calendar migration is required.
Next I'll hand it off to Jon to talk
about how G Suite works seamlessly
with other applications.
JON HARMER: Thanks, Jeffrey.
So Jeffrey told you all about how G Suite works seamlessly
with Microsoft tools.
And now I'll dive into how the other tools you use
can work within G Suite.
So as we talked about in the beginning of the session,
professionals have access to dozens
of different applications to get their work done.
Salespeople might be drafting a proposal in Google Docs,
frequently jumping back-and-forth to their CRM app
to look up customer information.
Engineers and project managers get
an email asking for a roadmap, and they
need to open up their team's projects
tracking tool to answer.
Lawyers are organizing paperwork for a deal that's
about to close, and need to jump back-and-forth
to their e-signature tool or their case management system.
And everybody schedules meetings in Calendar,
and frequently you need to add a conference
page from another tool, or reference data from your CRM.
All this app-switching adds up.
It could be distracting because you're taking away
from your primary task, and it could be confusing
because you accumulate 100 different windows
and tabs on your desktop.
And as I bet many of us can relate,
it can just get a bit tiresome.
So I'm here to talk to you today about G Suite Add-ons,
and how G Suite Add-ons can simplify
how you use these third-party applications to get work done.
So you might be thinking, I've been using integrations
within G Suite for some time.
I've downloaded data connectors in Sheets,
or other add-ons in Docs.
So aren't all integrations G Suite Add-ons?
Not exactly.
G Suite Add-ons is a new framework
that we announced at Next 2019, which
allows you to simplify how you work
in a third-party application from inside of Gmail, Google,
Calendar, and Google Drive.
Yes, Docs add-ons listed in the G Suite Marketplace
are also ways for you to work in your required third-party
applications.
But we wanted to enhance that and bring you
a more delightful, cohesive experience.
With G Suite Add-ons, you have a more intuitive and simplified
user experience across G Suite.
What we'll show you today is how G Suite Add-ons
is a single add-on to install that works across multiple G
Suite applications.
So this includes a persistent side panel
that follows you across all your G Suite applications.
G Suite Add-ons utilize this persistent side panel
as a homepage, which allows you to work
in the third-party application that
isn't tethered to the context of the specific document
or the item that you're working on.
So imagine being able to pull up a task list that's
your overall list of to-do's, and it follows you around
as you work within G Suite.
Rather than just seeing your action items related
to the specific document, you're now
able to maintain a macro view of your work
across that third-party application, all
from inside of G Suite.
And lastly, G Suite Add-ons have enhanced the management
and security protocols, which simplify
how admins can manage and install add-ons
across the enterprise.
So the first thing we want to focus on with G Suite Add-ons
is the Quick Access side panel I talked about.
So here, we can reduce context-switching,
which has always been important to G-Suite.
And we've already helped solve part
of this problem for switching between G-Suite's own apps.
So within that G Suite side panel,
which is available across G Suite,
you can access things like Calendar, Keep, and Tasks
inside of Gmail, Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sheets,
Google Slides, and Google Drive.
This side panel lets you keep these other G Suite
apps open side-by-side with the main G Suite app,
so that you can quickly look up information,
or take actions such as referencing your calendar,
while you're composing an email to somebody you need to meet
with outside your company.
G Suite Add-ons allows you to consistently access
your other workplace apps right from that same G Suite side
panel.
In this example, you can access the G Suite
Add-on on that you use for managing tasks
through Workfront.
The powerful new thing here is that you can access this add-on
while you're working, whether you're
in Calendar, Drive, or Gmail.
So as a user, you install a single add-on
and it's successful across all G Suite, streamlining your work
and saving you from all that context-switching.
From workflows, to customer relationship management,
to task management, and even things
like importing third-party data, you
can work across your organization's tech stack
from the place you already spend the most
time, which is G Suite.
You can surface relevant information
and enable actions from third-party apps
based on what you're working on, and which
G Suite app you're working in.
You can minimize context-switching
and save valuable time by eliminating the need
to jump from tab-to-tab and app-to-app
to get your work done.
In this example, you could update the status
of a task in Workfront, continue the comment thread
regarding this task directly from that side panel,
without ever having to jump back-and-forth
between Gmail and Workfront.
G Suite Add-ons also present actions
related to your Drive files or your Calendar events.
For example, suggesting an attachment,
or attending a particular Calendar event.
Another thing to know is that G Suite Add-ons are also
available in mobile on Gmail right now, with other apps
to follow later on, so that you can quickly
access relevant information, quick actions, wherever
you are.
G Suite Add-ons can also offer up specific entry points
tailored to each G Suite app.
So we've talked about the persistent sidebar
the works across G Suite.
But G Suite Add-ons can also integrate
with the Compose box in Gmail, and things
like the conferencing options in Calendar.
More and more of these entry points will be added to G Suite
across-- over time, making your favorite workplace
apps even more deeply-integrated within G Suite.
And of course, you have to find all these integrations.
So the way you do that is you go to the G Suite Marketplace,
usually by clicking the Plus button
at the bottom of the side panel we've been talking about.
G Suite Marketplace is the home of thousands
of business applications that all integrate with G Suite.
And if you're an admin, you can control
which business apps your organization integrates,
and also manage custom private-built apps
for your internal use cases.
So today, we're really excited to announce that G Suite
Add-ons are coming to Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google
Slides.
With this upcoming launch, G Suite Add-ons will now be
avail--
will now enable you to use a single add-on
with a consistent behavior across six core G Suite
applications, Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Docs,
Sheets, and Slides.
Users will love the consistency and speed
connecting to the other tools that they
need to get their work done.
Admins will appreciate easily managing
which add-ons their employees have access to use,
and which data are available to those add-ons.
So let's look at a couple of examples of how this will work.
Imagine you need to get a document signed.
You have your document open.
You open the DocuSign add-on from the side panel,
add an email address, and click Send for Signatures.
That's it.
No jumping back-and-forth between the document, DocuSign,
and Gmail.
The entire workflow takes place where you need to have it,
just inside of G Suite.
Or imagine you're making a slide deck for your Sales team,
or for a big presentation.
You can search for stock images from Adobe Creative Cloud
and insert them directly into your deck.
No more jumping over to a new tab,
browsing images, downloading to your desktop,
and inserting into the slide.
With G Suite add-ons, you can execute on that entire process
without ever having to leave Google Slides.
And as I mentioned before, for admins,
we've really made it easy to manage and control
these add-ons for their users, to ensure
that the business-- their business data is safe
and that their users are productive.
We designed the add-on framework to only
access the minimum amount of data necessary,
and only access it at a time the user is actually
interacting with it.
We also make it easy for you to create your own add-ons
for any specific internal use cases that you may have.
Finally, with domain-level install and whitelisting
options, we enable admins to control
which add-ons their users can install themselves,
or to install an add-on holistically
for the entire company.
So why should you care?
What kinds of things does this enables you to do?
So you can imagine having a central repository
of all the approved assets across your company
that you can easily insert into any email, document,
or presentation that you're working on.
Or being able to receive a document in Gmail,
as I mentioned before, and easily
sign it without having to leave G Suite.
You can have your task list available across all of G Suite
so you stay focused on the most important work
and get things done.
And of course, you can import or export data into Sheets
so you can run your monthly sales reports.
And finally, you can do things like creating new contacts
in your CRM right from inside of Gmail.
And let's hear about G Suite Add-ons
from a couple of our partners.
DocuSign has over 4 million add-ons installs,
and an average rating over 4 stars in the G Suite
Marketplace.
In their user research, they've heard feedback
that their user base wants a simplified solution
to use DocuSign within G Suite, and minimize the need
to jump from tab-to-tab to execute on core workflows.
They said, we're excited about G Suite Add-ons coming
to Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides,
because it enables us to deepen the integration between G Suite
and DocuSign.
With G Suite Add-ons, DocuSign users
can now act on agreements from Gmail, Drive, and Docs,
whether they are sending or signing,
all from one integration.
Having everything in a single integration in G Suite
provides users not only with a consistent way
to interact with DocuSign across all the G Suite apps,
but also means that users only need to download the app once.
We look forward to being part of the Google Docs, Sheets,
and Slides Developer Early Access Program,
and can't wait to deliver this unified experience
to our joint customer base.
Adobe is another partner who has reached millions of joint users
through their integrations with G Suite.
In this example, you can see a user receiving a file in Gmail,
opening up the Adobe Creative Cloud side panel,
and saving the attachment to their Creative Cloud library
without ever leaving Gmail.
As you add this to the process we described earlier,
a user could receive files in Gmail,
save them to their Creative Cloud library,
jump over to Docs or Slides to build a one-pager or a sales
deck, and pull those files right in from their Creative Cloud
library, without ever leaving G Suite.
The integration with Adobe allows
for creative professionals to do their work
in the native Creative Cloud applications,
while enabling their teammates to use those assets in G Suite
applications.
As Adobe would put it, bringing Creative Cloud into G Suite
enables our mutual user base to simplify routine tasks
while staying productive.
And to sum it all up, the bottom line
is that we want to make sure that you
can work the way you want.
We know you require multiple third-party applications
on top of G Suite.
So no matter what apps you use, with G Suite add-ons,
you can get your best work done.
All without switching tabs, navigating app windows,
or losing time changing context.
All without leaving G Suite.
So learn more about G Suite add-ons by visiting our website
at gsuite.google.com/products/add
ons.
Or you can browse ready-to-install integrations
in the G Suite Marketplace.
On behalf of Jeffrey and myself, thank you.