Dive Brief:

• Google announced a slate of changes to its productivity and collaboration suite, responding to the shifting needs in the enterprise markets as workers trickle back into the office.

• The company will update the Rooms experience within Google Chat, billing it as a single hub to centralize people, topics and projects within Google Workspace.

• Google is planning to update its collaboration platform Meet with an option for respondents to say whether they'll be joining remotely or on-site, and other features aimed at creating an equal meeting experience regardless of location.

Dive Insight:

Enterprise software players are vying for loyalty from the business world as a new operating model takes over. The tools and settings that allowed companies to operate through the pandemic may no longer have the same impact, leaving customers to ask what's next.

Zoom got to work on the physical manifestation of its product. Its latest move is a hardware effort via a new line of all-in-one phones, which allow users to video chat and use digital whiteboards.

With the recent set of updates, Google — which competes with enterprise incumbent Microsoft in the productivity software space — is aiming to unify its set of tools and become the single experience users rely on for work, regardless of their location.

Google's three billion existing users now have access to the Google Workspace bundle, including Gmail, Chat, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets and Meet, the company announced Monday. 

Aside from optimizing internal interactions, players in the collaboration software space have also sought to become the standard tool for external business chat. Microsoft and Slack added external enterprise chat capabilities onto their platforms. Google, a staple in enterprise email by way of Gmail, also has external collaboration capabilities within Workspace.