 Google's Slack competitor Hangouts Chat is launching for business as part of G Suite. I don't know if you can really call it a Slack competitor. It's a Slack clone, which to me Slack is a clone of IRC, but I won't get too far off topic on that. Obviously Slack has extended, it's like IRC with a web interface and a lot of extensions and more programming than the back in the day bots that we used to write for our IRC clients and bouncers and everything else, but we'll stay on topic here. So this came out in February of 2018 was this announcement for it and it became available but I was not exactly quick to jump on it. Now I'm a long time Google fan and Google G Suite user of a lot of the services and tools around their business line, but their history when it comes to making any type of chat application, Hangouts and all that has always been confusing at best of products that we're going to go here, we're going to discontinue, we're going to change and I don't know, it's not been a clear path for them, we'll say that for sure. But it's been a while and well they didn't kill it and it's still available so we thought we'd give it a try and it turns out we liked it. So we've been a long time Slack user here at Lawrence Systems and we've decided to move to Google Hangouts Chat and we only recently started testing it in the last few days. That's also what I'm doing review right now before my chat gets filled with client information, phone numbers and things I can't just throw up here on the screen, but it is a couple things here and this may be a deal killer for some people of moving away from a product like Slack. First, there is no clear way if any way at all to allow external users who are not part of your G Suite so people who are not part of your G Suite in your company and the paid version only to join in. It does not seem to have any method to do that. There seems to be some debate in the forums that in the beta it was there and it's not there in the production that it's out. I'm not clear on it. I couldn't find a way to do it. It only lets me add users who are within my organization. I couldn't find any option and turn it off. So I didn't bother contacting Google support, but based on the forums, it's just not a feature that they are offering right now. Now, they do have a comparison and I'll leave you a link here because this was their learning thing and it's a comparison to features Tit for Tat and they did. They copied Slack, but Slack is not a complicated thing to copy. So it's not exactly like this to me was rocket science to do, but I do like the integration that Google offered with this. So I have a random room pulled up and it does look a lot like Slack with all kind of a clean white interface. We were throwing pictures in here for when we were doing the shirt designs and stuff we upload for the YouTube channel here. It does support the Giffy bot, which of course is really important. If it didn't support that, I'm not sure we could have switched because if you can't post animated gifts inside of all of this or just gifts in general, you know, what fun would that be? So we played around, we had our laughs with it. One of the things that is killer about it, like that works really well is the search. So you can instantly see anything I want to find, different messages and stuff like that. I can jump to say only show Giffy's things that were posted by the Giffy bot. They have only a few bots in here. You can look for like mentions that were specific for you, just images so you can find things. So they give you this really nice with the contextual search. Works really, really well and really fast. And this works the same on the phone. So if you're like us and we use a chat tool a lot, we use Slack a lot and we're going to be using this a lot, being able to find that piece of information, even if it was posted a while ago, has been really handy in here. Now we have strict rules. You do not post passwords or real personal information. But frequently we need a client's phone number when you're on site. It's a quick way to, hey, who do I have to talk to? And we'll drop that information in here. Now, the other thing that's really slick is when you drop documents in here, it right away figures out the documents and allows you to even change permissions. So if I grab a document and just grab the document link and we're gonna go ahead and start a new thread. Just hit send. It fills it in real nice. Yes, I know Slack can do some of this too. But it actually goes a step further because it allows me to, if anyone hits it, right away can do all the permissions in here. I've already given permission. This is a public document. But it will let me know the permissions of the other users in there. It's got a nice level of integration if you're a G Suite user. And Steve's like, are you testing shit? Yes, I am. I am testing shit. So this is how it works. And this is the other feature that GIM's really cool. So if we wanna start a video conference in here, testing video conference, this is the feature that I was really impressed with. So I can just click on this right away and I'm not sure if it's gonna have a fight with, yeah, camera failed because this is using my webcam right now. But you can create per, oh yeah, Steve's on his way to Birking so he couldn't join. So you can create per thread meetings and then go back to them. So we've done this a few times and you can jump back to that one and anyone who's in that one will still be in there so you can leave and come back. And what is really nice about this is it translates exactly the same way on the phone. So it's a very smooth transition from phone back to here to the Hangouts to the, well Hangouts Chat, whatever you wanna call it. It's been a nice, all the testing we've done has been really smooth and this is kind of a neat feature. So we're gonna go ahead and switch to it and I'll probably do a follow up video after a user for a while. Unfortunately, once we start using it for a while we have to block out things. But right now it's just full of junk and all the testing that a small number of us have been doing but we're gonna roll it out to the rest of my company here real soon. But it's a nice product. I do like it because of the integration with G Suite. I don't know that it's really a slack competitor. It's kind of nice because of its integration but it doesn't still have all the features. There's still not as many bots and things like that but we weren't using a lot of those bots so it really was kind of a, not a big deal to us for us to switch over to it. And we figured we'll give it a try. It's not like we can't go back to Slack because we really don't use any of it for archive information. The interesting thing that, because we were just using the free version of Slack, the paid version of Google Chat because it's paid with your G Suite, doesn't cost anything extra, has just a massive amount of storage on it so it will archive all this data for us which is kind of cool because we were long past the free limit on Slack and just losing all those old messages in case they were ever important. And to me, it's hard to justify the price per user for Slack when it's integrated with my G Suite. That's the other reason, you know, we thought we'd just give it a try and we really like it. The clean interface, the nice it works in a phone, it does have phone apps for Android and iOS and a desktop app which we tried and I don't know the point of because it works perfectly fine in a browser and I felt the same way about Slack. Slack was nice with the phone apps but it was also really, I didn't see the point in the desktop app because I just run it in a browser and a pen tab. So far, my first impressions of it have been pretty good. I definitely encourage you, if you're a G Suite user, take a look at it. Especially if you haven't started with Slack and you're not winning the gold on that road, you can jump right in here and it's just included with your G Suite so something you can definitely take a look at. So far that's my opinions if I thought I'd at least give it a kind of a mention because it hasn't gotten much fanfare but then again, Google's history with applications when it comes to chat has not been the greatest so I'm gonna give them a chance on this one and see how the adoption is and see if Google keeps the product going and keeps it up to date. All right, thanks. Thanks for watching. If you liked this video, go ahead and click the thumbs up. Leave us some feedback below to let us know any details what you like and didn't like as well because we love hearing the feedback or if you just wanna say thanks, leave a comment. 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