Google Chat is now available externally.
Can't say believe I'm saying this. I'm so excited.
If you want to know why, stay tuned.
What is Google Chat and why do you care?
The potted history of Google's chat applications
is a little bit complex
and I won't be getting into all of the detail.
But currently, the available chat application
is the Google Hangouts Chat.
There was a previous version to this -
not going to be talking about that at all.
There's now a new version called Google Chat.
It's been available or released for the last year or so.
It's only been possible to chat within your organisation.
So large organisations have, more than likely,
have adopted Google Chat.
But without the ability to chat externally
for a lot of smaller companies, or even large organisations
that may collaborate with other people,
it's incredibly frustrating.
That they haven't been able to chat externally.
The product is less valuable to them.
With the external chat available,
we can now fully adopt the Google Chat application.
The product is moving more towards the collaborative like
chat applications, such as Slack, that we've seen.
This new version of Google Chat
is essentially Google's response to
things like Slack and Microsoft Teams.
What those applications allow is not just sort of
interactive one-on-one chats,
but to also have these rooms, sort of meeting rooms,
where you can have room for particular topics,
Marketing team, the HR team,
and people, teams, can have their own conversations,
they can embed documents or place links to documents,
and comment, and like, and things like that.
One of the key differences are probably,
the two key differences, are bots,
which I'll explain in a moment,
and meeting rooms or rooms.
So rooms allow you to create a room as I said
for a particular topic or a particular team.
People can join a room or leave a room.
These are different from group chats
because within Hangouts, we've only ever had group chats.
Rooms allow much more interactivity as I said
you can actually place documents in them
and people can look and comment on them
and from with the application.
Bots allows, sort of, automation.
So what you can do is you can actually automate
maybe something along the lines of
your project management tools.
So you can link in a bot with you project management tool.
We use Asana and when I update a task in Asana,
it can actually update within the chat application.
So people who use Slack will be familiar with this
where you can be doing something.
There's some sort of Slack bot integration
and it will update you in Slack on the status
of that project, or that task, or, you know, maybe for CRM
what stage your lead, or opportunity is at.
So you can see how it would interesting
in sort of exciting ways that you could use that.
Organisations will begin to build out those bots
and those integrations.
So we are super excited about this.
It means that we can, sort of, help organisations now
to roll out the Google Chat application properly.
Up until now, we've been holding back as a Google partner
and many other Google partners as well
to roll out with our customers because we haven't had
this external chat and without the external chat,
as I said, the product is definitely - was-
less useful to people.
I want to give a shout out to our friends over at Cobry
who've created two interesting resources.
The first one is a video by Gordon,
one of the team over at Cobry and himself
and Rowan have done a little walk through
of the Google Chat application.
I'm going to link that in the description below
and whatever social channels we share this.
I think if you want to see a demo of it
and you haven't seen it, I recommend taking a look at that.
They're doing this sort of work from home series
I think at the moment.
And then the other thing is, which isn't listed publicly,
but the Cobry team actually built a fantastic
training document for customers
which goes through all of the different features
of Google Chat, how it differentiates
from the Google Hangouts, and how your team can quickly
get ramped up on the Google Chat application.
So two fantastic resources.
As I said, one is public, one of them you might have to
inquire with the Cobry team if they'll share it with you.
That is it from me.
I hope you enjoyed this week's update.
I'm super excited about the number of feature releases
we're seeing within Google Chat and Google Meet
and the video conferencing.
All those sort of collaborative stuff that Google
are working on on the moment.
If you have anything that you think that I missed,
please let me know in the comments below or indeed,
if there are any topics that you would like us to cover,
please let us know in the comments below as well.
That is it from me, I will chat to you guys next week.