Skip to footer

Google Hangouts woos businesses by ditching the need for a Google+ account

Google announced Wednesday that a Google+ account is no longer necessary for business clients wishing to use the Google Hangouts videoconferencing feature. 

|
Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP/File
A man walks past a Google sign at the company's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

"Hanging out" on Google will now be as easy as sending e-mails and sharing documents – while you're in the office, that is. 

In a move to give businesses the chance for more face time in their meetings, a Google+ profile will no longer be required to use Hangouts, Google's video-messaging service. This is in addition to a series of other apps Google announced that are geared toward business clients.

Starting Wednesday, Hangouts will be treated the same as any other Google app such as Gmail and Google Drive for business users. Regular users will still need a Google+ account for the time being.

Covering Hangouts under the same terms of service as other Google Apps for Business products means round-the-clock phone support and a 99.9 percent uptime. 

In a blog post, Clay Bavor, vice president of product management for Google Apps also said that reforms would soon be coming to Google Apps Vault, a feature that lets organizations maintain and store e-mails and chat data. 

In addition, Google says partnerships with existing videoconferencing services will provide further improvements to Hangouts. Blue Jeans lets people sync more traditional videoconferencing systems to Hangout and InterCall lets people use their phones to join videoconference meetings.

Users with a Chromebox, the desktop computer running Google's Chrome OS operating system, will be able to initiate videoconference calls with phone users. Other updates to Chromebox include the ability to connect "two displays to one Chromebox ... to see your audience and project a presentation at the same time." 

As Thomas Claburn writes in Information Week, this type of targeting of Google apps directly to business clients is "perhaps inevitable given that the company's biggest rival for business customers, Microsoft, made its fortune selling software by the suite, specifically Microsoft Office." 

He adds: "Adding Hangouts to Google Apps for Business isn't merely an exercise in bundling. It's an effort to convince business customers that the video conferencing platform can support the weight of an enterprise." 

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Google Hangouts woos businesses by ditching the need for a Google+ account
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/Horizons/2014/0730/Google-Hangouts-woos-businesses-by-ditching-the-need-for-a-Google-account
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe