External Users in Google chat Rooms

[Eghazdc]

In the free gmail accounts, you can create chat rooms with external users.

In the workspace business Starter accounts you can´t.

Is this right? I mean, if you dont pay have more features that the paid accounts...

Probably someone in google should check if this is the right configuration of the plans... Im very happy with google workspace but this is hard to explain...

[Jan-Carlos]

Hello!

That's really strange isn't it? I don't know why but that just how it works.

I don't have a proper documentation telling that.

But in this pic, you can see that it's not possible to deactivate external user on business starter, because they don't have this feature:

[Eghazdc]

Yes! Thanks Jan-Carlos! 

The strange is that free gmail acounts allows external users in chat rooms...

[adminfurlangrou]

Is there a work around for this? We work with outside vendors and need a way to communicate with them "live" - this is why we moved to Google Workspace!  Shame on me for not checking to see if this was possible...

[Eghazdc]

Hi, as the free gmail accounts allow that, yo can create a gmail account create the spaces you need with the vendors and your starters accounts and it will work.

you can call your gmail account something like spaces.mycompany@gmail.com 

yo can try to use just chats instead of spaces

[cryptochrome]

Unfortunately, there is no workaround. The hard truth is that the lowest-cost Google Workspace plan (Business Starter) simply does not contain the Chat Spaces product. 

Google should really stop selling that plan. It is so severely limited (not just with this feature, but with many others, too) that it can't be used for much more than evaluation purposes. Almost every second post on this community is from people being upset about some kind of limitation of the Starter plan. 

My ramblings aside: Your only option (at this point in time) is to upgrade to Business Standard. 

[mhaberl]

By price Business Starter compares to Microsoft Bussiness Basic, however Microsoft has its Teams product which has external users included. So this is just a fail.
It is simply not practical not being able to communicate with your client which has also a google account by chat.