Connecting more rooms to more meetings with new partners like Google Meet

Being able to work in flexible environments, with a variety of external partners and customers, is essential to these new ways of working. We are proud to announce a collaboration with Google that will help you meet with these key stakeholders from a workspace more easily.

Zoom Interop for Google Meet enables Zoom Rooms to call into Google Meet meetings - and Google Meet hardware devices to call into Zoom Meetings - without additional hardware or subscriptions for Zoom customers. This interoperability solution will only need to be configured and enabled by the admin and is expected to be available starting today.

Video interoperability between industry-leading companies provides so much more for all of our customers, especially now as people returning to the office use more video conferencing rooms and equipment. This allows us to better connect with customers or partners using a different provider.

With Zoom Interop for Google Meet, Zoom Rooms users can easily call into a Google Meet meeting. Just forward the Google Meet invite to a Zoom Room, and with just one button to press, join the Google Meet meeting instantly.

Here’s more about how it works:

Imagine you are Company A that uses Zoom Meetings and Zoom Rooms exclusively for all video communications, but you have weekly meetings with Company B that uses Google Meet. Company A receives a Google Meet invite. Once the invite is received, it is forwarded to the Zoom Rooms calendar where Company A wants to attend the meeting. 

The Zoom Room will recognize that the meeting invitation is for Google Meet and will display the calendar entry along with a One Touch to Join button. When it is time for the meeting, Company A users can enter the Zoom Room, touch the Google Meet button on the room controller, and the Zoom Room will join the Google Meet meeting.

Users can also manually enter the meeting ID to join, which eliminates the need for forwarding calendar invitations from external hosts.

It works the same way with a Zoom Meeting and users on the Google Meet service in a conference room. Google users can forward the Zoom invite they receive to the Google Meet conference room’s calendar, enter the room when ready, and join the Zoom Meeting with a single touch on the Google Meet touch controller.

Once in the Zoom or Google Meet meeting, users can leverage a core set of video conferencing features needed for most meetings, including high-quality video, audio, and user interface controls to mute audio or video. However,  the interop solution will not support all the native features of Zoom Rooms or Google Meet rooms.

For customers that host meetings on multiple platforms, waiting room bypass can be configured so that a Zoom Room owned by Company A can join a Google Meet meeting hosted by Company A as an authenticated room system and bypass the waiting room. This is also true for Google Meet hardware owned by Company B joining Zoom Meetings hosted by Company B.

We have been busy this quarter creating additional interoperability features!

In Zoom Rooms 5.13, we introduced the ability to join a Microsoft Teams meeting by entering the meeting information directly into the Zoom Rooms Controller or Zoom Rooms for Touch device, reducing friction in situations where the Teams calendar invitation hasn’t been added to the Zoom Rooms calendar.

We also introduced the option to display dedicated shortcuts for popular meeting platforms right on the Controller homescreen, including Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Cisco meeting solutions. This helps users easily and quickly enter the meeting information and join the meeting.

Expected to come by the end of Q1, we plan to open up basic SIP interoperability for all Zoom Meetings subscribers. This means that if your organization hosts a Zoom meeting with external guests that are joining using their SIP-based video conferencing system, they will have everything they need to join the meeting in the meeting invitation. For Zoom customers who have their own standards-based video conferencing systems, the Conference Room Connector (CRC) provides all of the features and functionality.

Zoom Interop for Google Meet is available today on Zoom Rooms for Windows, Mac, and most Appliances. Zoom and Google expect to continue working together to add features and improve the interop experience. Learn how you can better enable the hybrid workforce with Zoom Rooms.