In a nod to the fact that most company employees rely on an increasingly large number of collaboration tools, Google Inc. is adding more integrations with G Suite to ensure a smoother and more productive experience.

G Suite, Google’s collection of enterprise productivity tools,  includes programs such as Google Docs, Sheets, Hangouts and Calendar. The suite is a popular alternative to Microsoft’s Office products, but in a blog post today, Rany Ng, G Suite’s director of product management, conceded that these two are far from the only players.

“The average employee uses 36 cloud services at work to collaborate or share files,” Ng wrote. “That’s more apps than hours in a day! With so many apps and services, it’s important that your business chooses modern, open tools that make it easy to work with anyone.”

Ng said the latest integrations mean the tools offered in G Suite are ideal for such collaborative work. First up, Google is making its Hangouts video conferencing platform compatible with rival services and hardware offered by companies such as Cisco Systems Inc. and Polycom Inc. It’s also making it possible for Microsoft Corp.’s Skype for Business users to join Hangout meetings.

“We want to make it easier for businesses to use meeting solutions, like Hangouts Meet, without worrying about compatibility with existing equipment,” Ng said.

Google is also adding support for third-party conferencing natively in its Calendar app, so hosts will be able to create add-ons that allow people to create, join and view meetings directly from a Calendar event. What this means is that users can join a meeting from their computer or mobile device with a single click.

Cisco Webex is building an add-on to help users schedule meetings directly from Google Calendar without requiring a download or plug-in, Ng said. Other providers, including GoToMeeting, owned by LogMeIn Inc., and Dialpad Inc. are also building add-ons, which will be made available in the G Suite marketplace.

Google is also expanding its integration with Microsoft Exchange Server, which is the software and cloud company’s enterprise-grade email and calendar service. With the integration, it’s now possible for users to book resources such as rooms and equipment for meetings, conferences and so on.

Other new integrations coming up include the ability to add people from outside organizations in Chat, Google’s messaging service. In addition, Google is adding the ability to import enterprise resource planning content from SAP SE to Google Sheets.

G Suite users can now import content directly from SAP to Sheets (Image: Google)

“With this new integration, you can skip manually exporting data to CSVs and uploading them to Drive,” Ng said. “Instead, export directly to Sheets and analyze data with tools like intelligent pivot tables.”

Image: Google