Much has been written already about Google’s new social platform called Google Plus, to the point that social media consultant Chris Brogan has already announced a book about using Google+ for Business. 

Given my passion for experimenting anything video and social media, I was curious to find out if the new video chat feature called Google+ Hangouts was a potential candidate for a corporate environment. So I partnered with Jeris Miller, Communications Co-Chair at TEDxRainier, to run a few experiments and push the tool beyond what it was originally conceived for.

There is a lot to like about Hangouts: it’s free, it allows up to 10 people to have a face-to-face virtual meeting including chat, and even watching a YouTube video together. But what about business users?

Some of the basic requirements for effective webinars are easy scheduling, presentation / desktop sharing and ability to record your session, all features that are currently missing in Hangouts. But let’s see if there are some workarounds:

Scheduling
Jeris has been using a site called http://gphangouts.com to schedule her TEDxRainier speaker communications with good success. This third party site allows the listing of your hangout in a public directory and offers some integration with Google Calendar. I personally find the process very manual and not particularly intuitive, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Presentation / Desktop sharing
While seeing your audience is a nice consumer feature, businesses prefer to have conversations over slides. In fact, popular video conference tools like GoToMeeting, WebEx and Live Meeting do a great job in offering a high quality picture of your presentation / demo. Because Hangouts doesn’t offer this opportunity, we looked for alternative ideas, including using an application called ManyCam to switch the video source from our webcam to the desktop or using a document camera to project handwritten notes from an iPad. 

Needless to say, none of these solutions are viable, mainly because the quality of the projected image is fairly poor. A much better way to share a presentation is to invite your viewers to watch your slide deck using the new PowerPoint 2010 Broadcast feature, or if you use Prezi, to leverage Prezi Meeting to control your show remotely. Either way, the experience is not integrated in Hangouts as the presentation sharing happens in a separate window. 

Recording a session
Hangouts happen in real time, but sometimes you want to save the conversation for on demand viewing. This feature is not supported yet, and you have to resort to separate screencasting software like Camtasia to record your session. Users not familiar with this kind of tool may find the process not particularly user friendly.

What’s our conclusion? In its first iteration, Google+ Hangouts is definitely a consumer play. It’s a fairly intuitive tool that is fun to use and will compete directly with Skype Group video calling, especially because of its unbeatable price (free).

As per its social enterprise ambitions, we’ll have to wait until Google addresses the above limitations and add a few more integration points, especially with their remarkable Google Docs suite and mobile devices.

Hangouts' future is very bright and I certainly look forward to further experiments with Enterprise Social Video.