Google announces updates to G Suite

Google on Friday announced major updates to its G Suite including -- Google Drive, Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat to enhance enterprise productivity and secure collaboration. The key enhancements announced in Drive are -- Team Drives, Drive File Stream, Google Vault for Drive and AppBridge.

"In order for Google to deliver on this Cloud promise, we must not only meet enterprise companies where they are today in terms of security, compliance, and connectivity standards, but also raise the bar for what is possible with our advanced machine intelligence capabilities, said Prabhakar Raghavan, Vice President, APPS, Google Cloud, in a statement.

"Team Drives" enable teams to simply and securely manage permissions, ownership and file access for an organisation and are available for G Suite Business, Education, and Enterprise customers.

"Drive File Stream" allows employees to access Cloud storage content directly from their desktops, without requiring a sync or monopolising hard drive space. Google Vault for Drive gains additional controls so admins can manage retention and legal hold policies.

Google is welcoming "AppBridge" to help largest customers manage some of their most complex data migrations to Drive. "Hangouts Meet" is a new video meeting experience designed to make meetings frictionless. Up to 30 people can join a meeting within seconds with no downloads or browser plugins required, and it integrates with G Suite so one can present files natively.

"Hangouts Chat" offers teams a new way to connect with each other in virtual rooms, so they can keep work moving forward, even when they can't meet face to face. With deep integrations with G Suite, teams can embed content right in the conversation, so they can interact and discuss items from Docs, Sheets, Slides, Calendar and other files.

The company also introduced "Add-ons", a new way to integrate powerful enterprise workflows with Gmail. Add-ons makes it easy for developers to bring third-party applications into Gmail.