As an administrator, you can quickly migrate your organization from classic Hangouts to Google Chat using the Chat Preferred setting.
Why is Google Workspace moving to Chat?We're excited to transition Google Workspace users to Chat. Now every organization can benefit from our newest enterprise-grade team collaboration tool. Chat makes it easy for teams to get work done efficiently in one place. Along with 1:1 and group chats, Chat supports virtual spaces to help teams collaborate on projects in one place. Teams can share files from Drive, join online meetings with Meet, and add apps to pull other tools or workflows into the conversation.
If you turn on Chat Preferred:
- Google Chat replaces classic Hangouts in Gmail.
Users who previously turned off chat in Gmail won't see a change. - Classic Hangouts mobile apps will stop working and users will be redirected to open or download the Gmail apps for iOS and Android.
- The classic Hangouts Chrome Extension and App will stop working and users will be redirected to open or download the new standalone Chat app.
- The classic Hangouts web experience (hangouts.google.com) will still be available to help ease the migration.
- All previous chat history will still be accessible from both Gmail and hangouts.google.com, per the Vault retention policy set for your organization.
- Users can join ad-hoc online meetings through Meet.
Before you turn on Chat Preferred, we strongly recommend that you review the Deployment Guide. Follow the deployment steps to set up your users for a successful transition to Google Chat.
Note: when you turn on Chat Preferred, the Chats label in Gmail for viewing your previous chat conversations from classic Hangouts will no longer be available. You can search for your archived conversations by going to the Gmail search box and adding in:chat to your search.
Refer to Chat known limitations.
