19 Sep 2011

Google+ Hangouts for Enterprise?

Google Plus doesn’t support Apps accounts yet, but that hasn’t stopped everyone at work from adding one another. I have 32 people in my ‘colleagues’ circle (compared to a measly 25 in my ‘friends’). Surely there’s a way to harness this new platform in day-to-day business?

Turns out there is. Since Joey went back to Toronto last month the Apps team at Shopify (Myself, Joey deVilla and Edward Ocampo-Gooding) have been holding our regular morning meetings over Google Plus Hangouts. This has worked surprisingly well so far. The video and audio quality have both been great, even when we did a three-way connection on Friday. I like that there’s no associated contact list hovering in the background (like there would be with Skype) as well as the potential for drop-in, drop-out participants. We can just open the Hangout to everyone in our ‘colleagues’ circle and we’re good to go. The “whoever’s speaking gets center stage” feature is neat, but can get a bit annoying when the speaker changes rapidly. I’d really like to see an option to evenly split the screen between all participants, but other than that Hangouts are perfect for our short morning meetings.

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David at 10:00