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Dennis Snider

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The Party Is Over: Prepare to Say Goodbye to Google Hangouts

It’s official, Google Hangouts is going to be discontinued at some point in 2020. This news won’t come as a surprise, given that development on the app was paused by Google over more than a year ago. This was due to the fact that Google has been reorienting consumer-facing messaging services towards RCS and Android Messages.

Hangouts will live on for enterprise clients, with Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet facing the prospect of further development and functionality. But the consumer-facing side is certainly going to be axed, despite the fact that it remains a prominent chat option within Gmail and the application is still available on the Google Play Store.
The lack of maintenance means that the cracks are showing and the application has been criticized for a range of bugs and performance issues.

So, the Hangouts adventure is going to soon be over for consumers, but what about the enterprise options?
Hangouts Chat is envisioned as an app like Slack, which will allow teams to organize their chats into various channels and collaborate on a wide range of projects and initiatives with their colleagues. For its part, Hangouts Meet is going to be a platform for video meetings, more comparable to Skype or Zoom.

Office 365 Apps Are Now Available in the Mac App Store

The Office 365 Apps have finally arrived to the Mac App Store. The apps are Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote and OneDrive. The apps can be downloaded for free however you must have an Office 365 subscription in order to be able to use them. If you don’t have a subscription you can try the software for a month. The subscription also includes a 1 Terabyte of OneDrive cloud storage.