Google and Microsoft to allow users to access enterprise conferencing tools

The coronavirus outbreak in China and a few other countries in the world has forced the cities to be deserted. People are forced to remain in their homes and work remotely. While health experts are doing their best to deal with the virus, tech companies are also coming forward to make things easier for people who are struggling to work from home. Tech giants Google and Microsoft have announced that they will be granting access to some of its capable collaboration and conferencing tools for people who are forced to work remotely.

The tools by these giants are otherwise available only for the enterprise customers and will make it easier for people to work from home. The search engine announced on March 3, 2020 that it will be giving the users free access to some of the features of Hangouts Meet for all the G Suite and G Suite for education customers across the globe till July 1, 2020. This will mean that the organizations that are working remotely an hold meetings with up to 250 participants and can also live stream for up to 100,000 viewers with the help of just a single domain.

The organizations will also be able to record meetings and save them to Google Drive. On a regular basis, Google charges $13 extra for a single user per month for using such advanced features apart from the G Suite access that comes under the ‘enterprise’ tier. It can otherwise cost a single user a total of $25 per month. On the other hand software giant Microsoft is give a free six-month trial for the premium tier of Microsoft Teams.

This tier by Microsoft  that includes conferencing tools, was earlier designed for schools, hospitals and the businesses in China and is now available on a global basis. The company said that on March 10, 2020 it will release an update for the free version of Teams that will take back the restrictions on how many users can be a part of the team. The users will then be able to schedule conferences and video calls.

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