On Monday, Google announced a number of new G Suite integrations that aim to improve and simplify team meetings and workplace collaboration.

With the average employee using 36 cloud services at work to collaborate or share files, businesses must choose modern, open tools that make it easy to work with others inside and outside of their organization, according to a Google blog post.

Hangouts Meet will now be compatible with traditional video conferencing systems like Polycom and Cisco, Google announced in the post, to make it easier for businesses to use the solution without worrying about how it performs with existing equipment. Ultimately, this will help teams connect to meetings faster and avoid the productivity slowdown that tech conferencing issues cause.

Through a partnership with Pexip, teams will be able to join a meeting on Meet from their preferred system in the coming weeks, the post noted. Teams will also be able to use Microsoft Skype for Business to join a meeting on Meet directly from the Skype app.

SEE: Cost comparison calculator: G Suite vs. Office 365 (Tech Pro Research)

Google also announced support for third-party conferencing natively in Google Calendar. Conference providers will be able to build add-ons that let users create, view, and join a video conference directly from a Calendar event, on web, or mobile.

For example, Cisco Webex is creating an add-on that allows users to schedule meetings directly in Google Calendar, without the need for a download or plug in, the post noted. Other providers currently working on such add-ons include Arkadin, GoToMeeting, LogMeIn, Dialpad, RingCentral, Vidyo, and Vonage. These add-ons will be available in the G Suite Marketplace in the coming months, and more details for developers are also forthcoming, according to the post.

Companies will soon be able to book resources like rooms and equipment in Microsoft Exchange, the post said. So if you use G Suite, you will also be able to view and book those resources stored in Exchange and Office 365.

Google is adding the ability to include people from outside of your organization in Chat, to better collaborate with clients, vendors, and partners in one place. This can be especially helpful to use during a meeting to share information in real-time with those people, the post noted.

In the post, Google also mentioned an upcoming SAP release that will allow employees to gain new insights from their ERP content by importing it directly into Google Sheets. This means companies can skip manually exporting data to CSVs and uploading it to Drive, and can instead export it directly to Sheets and analyze it with tools like intelligent pivot tables. Enterprise users can also skip tedious formatting by recording macros in sheets, which will make it easier to streamline processes and share information across teams quickly, the post said.

These integrations follow others that aim to make the suite more useful, including third-party add-ons in Gmail and Google Docs, and better interoperability with Microsoft.

The new integrations could help bolster G Suite use in the enterprise, which is currently lagging behind that of Microsoft Office 365, according to a recent Bitglass report. As of this year, more than 56% of organizations have deployed Office 365, compared to 25% that use G Suite, the report found.

The big takeaways for tech leaders:

  • Google announced a number of new G Suite integrations for Hangouts Meet, Calendar, and Sheets to make it easier to schedule and host meetings and share information.
  • The new integrations could bloser G Suite adoption in the enterprise.