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It is just not Microsoft or IBM that is offering applications these days as many new companies are entering this field by offering competitive enterprise oriented Apps. Cisco has launched a wide range of collaboration tools that target the enterprise industry. Google has also been developing and launching several Apps and now it has announced that Google is expanding capabilities of its Apps suite by including several video features and that they would be added to other functionalities that are built and available in Gmail.
Video and voice chat were included as features in Gmail Chat that is the web implementation of Google’s instant message service, Gtalk. After its introduction, it has been seen that its features are slowly being included in other Google services as well. All these features all these days were seen to have been made available only on individual basis that were used for personal use and such features were not commonly available in enterprise scenario. Now Google has decided to broaden the capabilities of voice and video chat features by allowing more number of participants to take part and by allowing it to be used for business and other occasions that involve a group.

Google’s App Product Manager Mr. Rishi Chandra talking to the media has said, “This [current Gmail capability] is the first step in a much broader set of features we hope to roll out over the next six to 12 months around video [and voice] chat capabilities. It’s a great opportunity for us to push that space along.”

Google has said that it would not be including a separate product as such for this purpose and there will not be any dedicated video collaboration tool. Instead, the features that are now available would be upgraded and the video chat would be integrated with other products making another layer of communication available for the users rather than a separate product. It has also been announced that the central hub for these features would still be Gmail.

No other information about the video features that are introduced has been revealed and it is still not clear on whether it would be making use of the Swedish video conferencing technology that it recently acquired from Marratech. However, Google has made it clear that at the moment it is not planning to introduce any social networking features similar to ones that are introduced by its competitors. It seems like the company has decided to wait and check the response that they get for the features that they are including now. In addition, later, they have said that they would decide about the inclusion of social networking features depending on the response they get now.