Google makes Chromebox for Meetings more business-friendly with sweeter service

Google looks keen on making its new Chromebox for Meetings videoconferencing system really well suited for businesses. Today the tech giant added some new features to the product.

The most notable upgrade: a service-level agreement (SLA) that ensures Google will keep the system working 99.9 percent of the time. That puts it on par with Google services like Drive and Gmail, which many businesses already use.

Clay Bavor, vice president of product management on Google Apps, announced the upgrade in a blog post today.

The second thing to flag: integration. Blue Jeans and InterCall are now working with Google to make existing systems work with Chromebox for Meetings.

These might not sound like announcements you’d expect from a consumer-facing search engine company. But Google in recent years has been turning more toward businesses that pay big money for reliable software and hardware. You can see this in the Google cloud infrastructure strategy and in less-than-sexy Chromebook feature announcements.

Google’s Bavor also wrote today that anyone with a Google Apps account can jump on a video Hangout, not just people with Google+ accounts. And admins can control calls from a Google Apps console.

Oh, and in the future, Bavor wrote, it will be possible to hook up two displays to a Chromebox for Meetings system.