Recent months have seen a spate of updates across the Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 productivity suites. With more and more of us making the move to remote and hybrid working, these multi-app packages offer businesses a lot of utility as they try to capture more users. However, there is an understanding that they can’t do everything and that users will need to incorporate third-party services into their workflows, and this is why Google has announced that is working hard to augment third-party integrations for Google Workspace. Let’s see what’s going on.
At Google’s recent Cloud Next 22 event the internet giant released details about plans to enhance what it calls its Smart Canvas platform, which is what powers integrations with third-party apps. Smart Canvas uses widget-like innovations called Smart Chips and Google is going to bring these into third-party applications and make it much easier for them to interact with Google Workspace files.
The move will help Google push Workspace as a more complete and all-in offering for users. Although Workspace has made huge strides to catch up with Microsoft 365, it has to be said that the Microsoft offering is a much more complete offering.
According to Tech Radar, the new and improved third-party app integration system will mean that users of other services such as “AODocs, Atassian, Asana, Figma, Miro and Tableau can expect integration with smart canvas soon.”
Google is built on incredible talent and has achieved incredible things developing Workspace to where it is today. Again, however, it is worth pointing out that the integrations will have to be extremely effective if they are to compete with the almost seamless integrations Microsoft is able to offer across the suite of its own products. Once again, we are seeing interesting developments in the battle of the productivity suite giants.
In other Google News, Google Docs added simple integration facilities with Google Maps allowing users to easily flag locations in their documents.
