Google Hangouts Chat (chat.google.com), part of our G Suite for Education environment, allows you to send direct messages or participate in group conversations, helping team members collaborate easily and efficiently. You can also create dedicated “rooms” for ongoing projects or other group work. Hangouts Chat is integrated with G Suite, making it easy to upload and collaborate on documents in Google Drive, or to participate in audio/video conferences with Hangouts Meet. Hangouts Chat and Meet can both be accessed by clicking on the Google bar (the “waffle” icon in the upper right-hand side of your Gmail session in a browser).

Learning Center Resources

• Go here to learn more about using Hangouts Chat and to see how the interface differs from classic Hangouts in Gmail*
• Go here to learn more about using Hangouts Meet

Important Note About Group Conversations and “Hangouts” Product Naming

Hangouts Chat and Meet, together, are the next version of what is now known as “classic Hangouts”, the version of Hangouts that lives in your Gmail. Group conversations conducted in classic Hangouts can’t be viewed in Hangouts Chat, and vice versa. Google will begin a retirement phase of classic Hangouts in October of this year. Because of that, we recommend using only Hangouts Chat for group messages, and not classic Hangouts.

For more information about interoperability, please see this article.

For additional help and questions, please contact the ITS Help Desk.