Whether you want to chat with a co-worker or communicate with your entire team, Google Hangouts Chat is Google's hottest new messaging product that works wonders! In this video, Peter Moriarty discusses everything you need to know, how it compares to other solutions, and how to get started.
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Transcription:
G’day there, Pete Moriarty here, and in today's video I'm going to be covering Google Hangouts chat, everything you need to know, how does it compare against other solutions and how can you get started with Google's hottest new messaging product
Google Hangouts itself has gone through quite a bit of an evolution over the last few years. What first started out as a video conferencing product alone, and to be honest, was not great, it was a bit slow, it was a bit buggy, and you could only connect with people inside your company. Well, it's now transformed into two different streams, those being Hangouts Meet, and now the brand new Hangouts Chat.
Uses of Google Hangouts Chat
What are you going to use Google Hangouts Chat for? Well it's great for the inter-office chatter and banter within the company, as well as fantastic for anyone whose outside the office, whether they're running errands, moving about for the day, working from home, or even working from a completely different location. Hangouts Chat is the way that you and your team are going keep connected for your day-to-day communication.
The original Google Hangouts instant messaging was really only great for one-on-one. Yeah, there was the ability to create groups and whatnot, but it wasn't really that effective. This was a piece of technology that was acquired by Google to replace G chat, which was a very old version of chat software that was around from the Gmail days. Google Hangouts never really got any development. It didn't have an API release, so you couldn't integrate any third party applications into it, and it was really only ever a me too product, and sadly never got updated or improved, apart from the standard upgrades and updates for different operating systems.
Then Slack came along a few years ago and really blew everyone out of the water. Slack is not really that much of a sophisticated product in itself, it's just an iteration of the old school kind of chat rooms, and message threads, and instant messaging. But what Slack did really well, was it gave everyone a modern, powerful application to effectively keep communicating and keep connected with your team members, that worked across all devices, was free for most companies based on how you used it, and it had great integrations as well. Slack really did what Google should have done about three years ago. And so Slack had this massive head start, Google decided they were going to redo Hangouts, but redo it properly from the ground up.
Hangouts Chat was released and announced a whole year ago, but the public didn't get access to it. Google kept it way under wraps, and for a whole year, they've been improving it, working with partners, building third party integrations with some of your, hopefully, most favorite apps. And, what Google have now released is a great, very sophisticated product which is extremely powerful, has integrations right out of the box, and, I've got to say, it's really going to come up well against Slack. I'm really glad that Google took the extra time to build out this product, and make it into something that's going to be useful for business owners, particularly everyone in the Google ecosystem.
Getting things Done with Hangouts Chat
So how are you going to get things done with Hangouts Chat? Well, you can securely message your whole team from any device that you're using, whether that's a Mac or a PC, you can use the web interface, you can download apps, even if you're on a mobile device, you can use your mobile as well. Of course tablet versions of all of the apps are there too. What this means is that you're using your Google account. You don't have to worry about signing into yet another third party service that might have licensing or different terms, and is harder to control for all of your staff. Hangouts Chat is fully integrated with your Google groups, with your Google login, and of course with one single login, makes it much easier to manage your staff connections as well. That also has the added benefit of meaning that you can use something like Google Vault for your compliance, and ensuring that any company messages are managed and controlled by the company domain and your company administrators.
Apart from the standard day-to-day massaging, where you can have channels, where you have certain groups of staff commenting on things, you can have threads where a single conversation can turn into a thread with different team members being tagged in and brought in, just to the conversation that they need to be. Well, you can also add bots and automations right inside your Google Hangouts, and what does that look like? Well, from the basics of a meeting scheduling bot which will automatically look at everybody's Google Calendars and schedule a time for different people to meet, you can also do things like have tasks in Asana, automatically share updates into a public channel, or you may decide to create a new task.
One of our favorite integrations is Dialpad. You can trigger a phone call to one of your team members right from within Google Meet, and of course my favorite is scheduling a Google Hangouts meet, which is a video meeting, right from within your Hangouts Chat.
There's some fun bots as well. There's a meditation app which is going to remind you about daily meditation and mindfulness. There's even one for Giphy, so if you want to throw in your best GIF reaction to anything in a public chat, that's there as well. But where Hangouts Chat gets really powerful is the ability to either create your own bot, or connect via an API.
With the Google Hangouts API, it's extremely simple and easy to get going. Probably want to get the help of an IT person to help you do that, but it's not too difficult to use just about any third party app. Apart from the bots that come out of the box with Google, from different vendors like Asana and Zendesk, and even Dialpad and other great tools like Xero, well you can also create your own. Using the API, which is going to take a little bit of computer code to make that all happen, you can either create your bot from scratch, or you can easily integrate with a tool like Zapier.
Zapier is a cloud-based connector tool, and what that does is that can bring data from pretty much any cloud-based system online, or any API online, and bring that right into your Hangouts Chat. We've used that for some pretty cool uses. When we make a sale in our customer management system Infusionsoft, it's automatically going to log that into our sales chat, and it's going to put it into our team chat as well, right inside of Hangouts. When we get a rating from a customer on a service ticket using customer thermometer, that's also automatically going to appear inside our chat rooms. So any event or any piece of data that you've got in different cloud based systems, you can bring those right into where you need them inside your hangouts chat, and we absolutely love that feature.
Google Hangouts Chat vs Slack vs Facebook
So how does Google's Hangouts chat stack up against Slack, stack up against Facebook workplace? There's even Microsoft teams, Microsoft now have their own chat version. How's it going to compared to these solutions? I'm very glad to say the Google solution is extremely mature. They really did take the time to launch with an API from day one so you can create those third party solutions and those third party integrations. They also automatically integrate with the rest of the Google ecosystem brilliantly. The ability to schedule meetings, the ability to bring in team members for everything automatically, the ability to use your google groups when you're creating rooms to make sure that if someone joined your company and they get added to the sales group, they're automatically going to be invited to the room about sales right inside of Hangouts Chat. I love these features, and I love how tightly integrated the rest of the google ecosystem is with Hangouts Chat.
One clear advantage over something like Slack or another third party chat solution is that Hangouts Chat is free and included with your G suite subscription, so if you're already a G suite customer, it doesn't matter if you're on a basic or a business plan, you have access to Hangouts Chat. And that's the thing I really love. Having used Slack and we've got lots of data in there. If you're on a free plan, which we are, after months and maybe even years, you end up with a lot of company information inside that Slack account. Now the problem is that on the free plan, Slack only give you access to the last, I think it's a thousand or maybe 10,000 messages, but once you want to search for something older than that limit, well you're locked out. Slack are holding that data hostage until you decide to upgrade to a paid plan and that ends up being around 40$ or $50 per year per person.
That's the cost of the G suite account over again for the whole team. And so my personal opinion is that if you're already using G suite, why would you bother using a third party tool? Sure, they might be one or two features, let's call them 10 percenters or 20 percenters that might mean you want to stick around with Slack, but if you can get away without those and move over to Hangouts Chat than our opinion is always keep it simple, keep it more affordable and keep it easier for you and your team. We also tried out other alternative applications like Facebook workplace and to be honest, we just found they didn't really get the sticking power with our teams. We gave them a serious go and what we found was the day to day chatter of an instant messaging app for culture, for sharing fun moments and of course for getting work done was much more effective than a solution that required posting and then waiting on others. And to be honest, we liked the idea of staying away from Facebook for our work stuff. We don't want Facebook to be a workplace. We want our work tools to be a workplace and that's what we use Google for.
Right now, other tools might be better for cross company collaboration. Slack and Facebook for teams is great if you've got non-company members who want to join in the conversation, Google are yet to release their guest access mode for Hangouts Chat, but it is coming right around the corner so it won't be too far away. If you're ready to roll this out, that's absolutely fantastic. You can head along to chat.google.com And you're going to sign straight in and that's going to allow you to start getting going with Hangouts Chat. If you're not already a member of cloud concierge, which is our premium support service for everything G suite, well then you should consider joining. Head along to itGenius.com. Click on the membership tab, and you can learn all about the benefits of being a member of cloud concierge.
For our members, you get access to genius academy, and we've already recorded a deep dive into Hangouts Chat, how you can get it set up for your domain and roll it out to all of your team members, including all of our best practice tips on how you can make sure that you get the most out of all the features of Hangouts Chat. And if you'd like to get some integrations done, perhaps you've got a third party application or a cloud system of some sort and you want information from that system to come through the API into your chats, like for example, something like zero, something like getting a sales alert for the sales team, anything like that. Well, if you're a cloud concierge member, then our team can also help out with that as well.
Anything you need, get in touch with our team by emailing [email protected] And I look forward to seeing you in the next video. Cheers.
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
