With a slew of new integrations and features for the suite of online collaboration tools, the Google Workspace team is aiming to bridge the gap between its own and third-party services.
At Google Cloud Next ''22, the company discussed intentions to keep the boundaries between apps through expanding the capabilities of its smart canvas platform, which has already been available over the past year.
Google will introduce smart canvas head innovation, smart chips, and other third-party applications, making it even easier to connect people, files, and events to Google Workspace files.
Customers of partner services such as AODocs, Atassian, Asana, Figma, Miro, and Tableau can expect an integration with a smart canvas in the near future.
Google''''s collaboration competition
This isn''t an entirely selfless move. Google is aiming to make Workspace the unique front-end for an organization workflow.
If these integrations are intuitive, the strategy might work - having to switch tabs is labor consuming for employees, and it may be confusing if they are working across multiple services.
Google is also working on making Workspace an intuitive and interconnected package of applications rather than a group of distinct pieces of software.
Additional tweaks to smart chips, such as integrating them with Google Sheets, and permitting businesses to utilize them to create templates in Google Docs, may help them improve the value of the investment.
The company is enthralling that a clever canvas will make Workspace a better value proposition than Microsoft 365, which historically profited from tight integrations between its various components, extending all the way to the Windows OS on which most business computers operate.
Google has been urging businesses to abandon Microsoft 365 for a long time now. In 2022, alone, it has allowed editing Microsoft Office files from inside Workspace and improved its notifications about compatibility issues with them.
However, although Google''s strategy for app integration is generally appreciated, it remains to be effective in catch-up.
The possibility of Google Workspace becoming closer to feature compatibility with the market leader is enormous, but there may be more to do before organizations are striving to alter their foundations.