Google’s software is about to play a lot nicer with your favorite work apps

Google is going big on third-party integrations for Workspace

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The team behindGoogle Workspaceis looking to bridge the gap between its own and third-party services with a raft of new integrations and features for the suite ofonline collaborationtools.

AtGoogleCloud Next ‘22, the company discussed plans to continue to “collapse the boundaries between apps” by extending the capabilities of itssmart canvasplatform, which has already been available over the past year.

Google will bring smart canvas’ chief innovation, smart chips, to third party applications, making it even easier to connect people, files and events to Google Workspace files.

Customers of partner services such as AODocs, Atassian,Asana, Figma, Miro and Tableau can expect integration with smart canvas soon.

Google’s collaboration competition

However, this isn’t an entirely selfless move. Google is angling to make Workspace the single front-end for an organization’s workflows.

If these integrations are intuitive, the plan could work - having to switch tabs is time consuming for employees, and can be confusing if they’re working across multiple services.

Google is also working towards making Workspace an intuitive and interconnected suite of applications, rather than distinct pieces of software.

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Additional changes to smart chips, like integrating them withGoogle Sheets, and allowing businesses to use them to create templates inGoogle Docs, may take it closer to achieving that goal.

The company is also plainly hoping that smart canvas will make Workspace a better value proposition thanMicrosoft 365, which historically has benefited from tight integrations between its various components, extending all the way out to the Windows OS on which mostbusiness computersrun.

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Google has been pushing for businesses to abandonMicrosoft365 for some time now. In 2022 alone, it has enabledediting Microsoft Office files from within Workspaceandimproved its notifications regarding compatibility issueswith them.

However, as welcome as Google’s drive for third party app integration is, it’s still only playing catch-up.

Google Workspace inching closer to feature parity with the market leader is great - but there may be more to do before organizations are itching to switch the foundations they’re built upon.

Luke Hughes holds the role of Staff Writer at TechRadar Pro, producing news, features and deals content across topics ranging from computing to cloud services, cybersecurity, data privacy and business software.

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