Dive Brief:

• Google is aiding team collaboration by making Hangouts Chat available as a central function of the G Suite, according to a company announcement on Wednesday. Chat will work with all other G Suite applications. 

• Each room in Chat allows up to 8,000 members, and users will be able to upload and collaborate on documents through Drive, have meetings on Hangouts Meet and search previous members, conversations and shared files.

• But Google isn't the only company working to mature its chat platform. Microsoft also announced the expansion of its guest access feature to "any email account with guest accounts." 

Dive Insight:

Competition in the communication platform market is fierce, and legacy tech providers are becoming entrenched in these enterprise-level collaboration platforms.

Microsoft is on the heels of its first anniversary of Teams, while Facebook's Workplace just celebrated its one-year mark in October. Microsoft has With 125,000 organizations using Teams, Microsoft is the de facto leader of the market. 

Teams was the second major communication platform to launch a cross-collaboration feature. Before Microsoft opened up guest access to any company with an Azure Active Directory account or anyone using Microsoft commercial cloud services, Slack did something similar.

Slack enabled intercompany communication in September with its "Shared Channels" feature. Google is doing something similar with Chats accessibility on the G Suite; the service boasts 3.5 million users.

With guest access, these platforms enable intercompany communication because most business collaboration is not limited to one office or building. Closing the gap between internal and external communication is critical for companies that no longer exist without partnerships. 

In the meantime, if employees are too distracted by these social media-inspired collaboration tools, get a "polite raccoon" to get employees back on track.