The barrier between Google Chat and Microsoft Teams is falling

For years, one of the biggest headaches in corporate communication has been the digital wall separating different workplace platforms. If your team lives in Google Workspace but your primary client, vendor, or supplier runs on Microsoft Teams, collaboration usually devolves into a messy web of guest accounts, fragmented email threads, and missed notifications.

Google has been actively working to tear down these walled gardens. Following up on their previous native connectivity push, Google has officially announced the next major milestone in cross-platform productivity: Google Chat external interoperability with Microsoft Teams via NextPlane OpenHub is now available.

According to the official announcement on the Google Workspace Updates blog, this release expands communication past your internal company directory, allowing Google Chat users to connect seamlessly with external organizations running Microsoft Teams.

True cross-platform collaboration

What makes this rollout so significant is that it isn’t just a basic text-bridge. This integration brings deep feature parity across organizational boundaries, allowing you to interact with external partners as if they were in your native ecosystem. According to the launch details, the OpenHub interoperability layer supports:

• Real-time presence: See when your external Teams contacts are active, away, or in a meeting directly from Google Chat.
• Flexible chat spaces: Launch 1:1 direct messages, spin up group chats, or collaborate natively across full Channels and Spaces.
• File sharing and media: Send documents, images, and project assets seamlessly back and forth between platforms.
• Instant calling: Initiate native voice calls and video meetings across the cross-platform divide without hopping between apps.

Even better, a single Google Workspace environment can securely hook into multiple external Microsoft Teams tenants simultaneously, allowing you to manage multi-company projects or complex joint ventures from a single, unified inbox.

Enterprise governance without the friction

Historically, trying to bridge two distinct corporate IT environments required jumping through endless security hoops, creating “ghost” user accounts, or dealing with messy cross-tenant impersonation setups.

Google and NextPlane have engineered this implementation to align strictly with modern enterprise governance best practices. OpenHub deploys as a dedicated single-tenant service that can run entirely inside a customer-owned Google Cloud Project (GCP), ensuring your corporate data stays completely under your own organizational control.

For IT managers and administrators, this means deployment friction is practically non-existent. There is no separate, third-party management portal to train your team on. Ongoing configuration, auditing, and user management are handled entirely through your existing Google Admin console and the Microsoft Teams admin center.

Availability

Because this requires administrative authorization on both sides of the aisle, Workspace and Teams IT admins must register NextPlane OpenHub as an enterprise application with their respective platforms before end-users can start chatting. Note that separate NextPlane licensing is required to light up the interoperability layer.

The feature has officially bypassed testing and is available now for both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains. It is rolling out globally to all Business (Starter, Standard, Plus) and Enterprise (Starter, Standard, Plus) Workspace accounts. If your daily workflow relies on constant communication with external Teams networks, head over to the NextPlane Connect Teams & Google Workspace portal to get your organization registered and tear down the communication barrier for good.