True to Google’s penchant for just announcing things right after they leaked, the company has unveiled a major Gmail redesign for G Suite business users ahead of next week’s Google Cloud conference. The application is no longer so much “Gmail” as a unified application for all Google communication platforms: Gmail, Chat, Rooms and Meet.
It will be available as an “early access preview” for G Suite customers this week and will be rolled out for all G Suite customers later this year. As for the consumer version of Gmail, it seems that little will change in the short term. Google says it is “actively thinking about how and when to bring this experience to consumers who want it.”
Javier Soltero, who came to Google last November with the mission of cleaning all this, characterizes it as an “integrated workspace” that should make it easier for workers to switch between these different modes of communication without feeling lost. So, for example, one day the chat box that already appears in a Google Doc or Google Meet window would not be an additional random box, but would be integrated with your other chats or rooms.
At this point, however, the main change is simply to put these tools in the same application (on your phone) or window (on your desktop). It should be less bouncing between browser tabs and apps. In one example, users on the desktop will be able to get a view with a chat in one column, a document in another, and a Google Meet video chat by hovering over both.
While there are some links in Gmail right now to these other products, this is a wholesale integration. It’s the logical next step for Google after it already pushed Google Meet to Gmail last May.
Putting all of these different communication vectors in one app has an added benefit: setting a Do Not Disturb status on all of them and muting your notifications in one place. You can also search for chats as easily as you can search in Gmail. Google says these integrations allow users to “quickly join a video call from a chat, forward a chat message to their inbox, [or] create a task from a chat message. “
Google is also trying to facilitate certain collaboration tasks. The distinction between Chat and Rooms, for example, is a bit confusing until you realize that Rooms should be more persistent spaces for discussing projects. Google is adding light versions of other G Suite products to Rooms – each will have their own assigned task areas and files.
Just as Microsoft is leveraging its Office 365 domain to get its users to adopt teams, Google is clearly taking advantage of Gmail’s popularity to power its own collaboration tools. For G Suite customers who want to fully live within the Google tool ecosystem, new integrations could make organizing their shared work easier. For everyone else, it could end up being a set of unwanted plugins that are getting harder to avoid.
The changes make G Suite focus primarily on Google Docs and Spreadsheets focus primarily on Google collaboration tools. G Suite has a bunch of products with overlapping features: Documents, Spreadsheets, Chat, Meetings, Tasks, Keep, Drive, and Gmail, they all have little built-in elements, but it’s too easy to miss.
“The story of these products is that they were all built individually,” says Soltero, “and they all had a central set of opinions that were obvious to everyone: multi-user, user collaboration, etc. … They all had the same set of ideas. shared, but not necessarily lead to a shared end goal. “
That goal is now much clearer: making G Suite communication apps the central point and organizing principle for all those other products. The Outlook tabs are Mail, Search / Files, and Calendar. For Gmail, all tabs are about communication tools. It is a movement that is clearly aimed at moving away from both Microsoft Teams and Slack. Google’s intention is to be at the forefront of a new definition of what a productivity suite is, but those other companies are essentially doing the same.
