Adobe’s Google Workspace Add-on lets teams share designs within Gmail, Docs, and Slides, creating on-brand experiences with seamless access to logos, fonts, and digital assets while increasing productivity eightfold.
Adobe is the leading maker of software to create graphics, edit photos, and build digital experiences. Its newest apps help everyday people—including students, social media creators, and small businesses—bring their ideas to life with tools that are simple, intuitive, and fast.
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United States
Adobe’s Google Workspace Add-on lets teams share designs within Gmail, Docs, and Slides, creating on-brand experiences with seamless access to logos, fonts, and digital assets while increasing productivity eightfold.
Google Workspace Results
Adobe has recorded strong growth in installations, reaching 2.1 million, the most for any Adobe app integration, in late 2022.
• 2.1 million Add-on installations
• 8x lift in productivity by streamlining collaboration
• Add-on enables seamless sharing and feedback across teams
is a software company dedicated to helping everyone design and deliver exceptional digital experiences. Founded in 1982, Adobe is known for category-defining applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. These have been the leading tools for creative professionals for photo editing, graphic design, and desktop publishing.
Adobe is a digital experience and cloud leader with software-as-a-service (SaaS) products, helping creators bring their visions to life across video, photography, motion graphics, 3D design, and more.
The company aims to democratize creativity, so that anyone—not just design professionals—can create rich content. Adobe’s newest apps such as Adobe Express offer everyday people—including students, social media creators, and small businesses—tools that are simple, intuitive, and fast.
With nearly $16 billion in revenue and 28,000 employees worldwide, Adobe understands that people want to be able to work and collaborate everywhere, and cloud offerings help make this a reality.
Key takeaways
• Adobe strives to empower its customers to work how they want with cloud-based applications rather than being constrained by traditional desktop software. This emphasis on the cloud is unleashing greater creativity and enriching storytelling, so its customers are able to offer more immersive digital experiences.
• Adobe is pleasing its clients and winning new ones by enabling them to easily share and integrate their Adobe creative work within applications. Putting Adobe where its clients work improves collaboration among teams and allows users to stay focused, increasing productivity eightfold.
• The extensibility of the Google Workspace platform and breadth of the ecosystem make building Add-ons a good investment. Adobe easily adapted its Add-ons so that it works in , , and with minimal additional development investment.
Simplifying and speeding collaboration
Evolving from a traditional software publisher, Adobe knows customers value the ability to act on creative inspiration whenever, wherever, and however they work. This motivates Adobe’s ongoing drive to make applications more accessible and flexible.
Adobe realized that workflows among its corporate users were complex, with many different stakeholders across their businesses, in their own teams, and across other teams. These users have a common need to share work and feedback. The company wanted to make these processes more efficient and allow users to focus on the creative process.
Consistency of brand experience is crucial for business users. Adobe knew it could add value by helping teams share creative assets more easily. Having direct and simple access to their assets would enable users to stay on brand when inserting a logo into a presentation or selecting a font for legal documents.
Many Adobe customers use Gmail and other Google Workspace applications such as Slides and Docs, and Adobe’s clients frequently requested Google Workspace app integrations. The unified extensibility of the platform was an asset in Adobe’s mission to support its users in creating exceptional digital experiences.
Google Workspace Add-ons accelerate adoption
“Our customers love the Google Workspace Add-on. This was a long-awaited integration that helps them remove context switching.” - Siddharth Arora, Senior Product Manager, Adobe
These insights inspired Adobe to partner with Google in 2020 to develop an . The Add-on enables seamless access to design assets in Adobe Creative Cloud from Gmail. This integration makes it easy to search for visual elements and attach links to Adobe files, libraries, and creations without leaving Gmail.
In 2021, Adobe created an Add-on for Google Docs and Slides. Users can seamlessly access the creative building blocks of brand experiences—fonts, logos, icons, and more—that are stored in Adobe applications. This Add-on is called Creative Cloud Libraries, and there is also a Chrome extension.
The ease of use for Google Workspace applications was a key attraction with the cloud architecture simplifying the user experience. With Google Workspace, users don’t need to have Adobe’s Creative Cloud desktop software installed. Google Workspace users authenticate their Adobe credentials through the Add-on.
Adobe has since added Team Libraries, replicating more capabilities of the Creative Cloud within the Google Workspace Add-on. And the benefits have been significant. Adobe has recorded strong growth in installations, reaching 2.1 million, the most for any Adobe app integration, in late 2022. "By removing that key obstacle to sharing creative files, this Add-on integration has really helped us accelerate the growth in adoption," says Siddharth Arora, Manager, Product Management at Adobe.
This integration also gives creative and business stakeholders a powerful new way to manage brand assets. With easy access to Creative Cloud Libraries inside both Adobe Creative Cloud and Google Workspace, marketing and product design teams can seamlessly share work, get feedback, and stay connected throughout their projects. Organizations can make element collections shareable and searchable, so creative users can quickly find relevant content and use it in the Google ecosystem.
Adobe is focusing on converting people who install the app into monthly active users and repeat users. Enterprise customers have reported significant productivity gains. For example, found that a team of 15 people who shared assets 20 times using Creative Cloud Libraries, rather than sharing them via a server, saved 4.33 hours.
With the Creative Cloud Libraries Add-on, users don’t have to leave the document or presentation they are working on to access design assets from Adobe applications, download them to their computer, and upload them to their current project. They always have the most up-to-date asset and a single source of truth. This ease of use, along with being confident knowing they are always in sync with their creative team, has attracted new users to Adobe products. "Our customers love the Google Workspace Add-on. This was a long-awaited integration that helps them remove context switching," Arora explains.
Maximum value from investment in Google Workspace Add-ons
“By removing that key obstacle to sharing creative files, this Add-on integration has really helped us accelerate the growth in adoption.” - Siddharth Arora, Senior Product Manager, Adobe
The experience of working with Google on the Add-on and the extensibility of the Google Workspace technology have been highlights for Adobe. During product development, Google Workspace team members shared user feedback about creating on-brand experiences, and that validated Adobe’s use cases.
"The breadth of the Google ecosystem is super important for us. A platform that allows me to build once and deploy on multiple apps—that’s a win. When I build for Docs, that functionality is available on Slides and Gmail with minimal cost. When you do a cost-benefit analysis, Google’s uniform extensibility helps us justify the investment and easily prioritize the Add-on," Arora says.
Unlocking the power of two rich platforms
“We are building a platform that allows creativity for anyone, anywhere—however our customers work.” - Siddharth Arora, Senior Product Manager, Adobe
Adobe plans to extend more Creative Cloud products to Google Workspace, including Adobe Cloud Documents and Spaces. The team anticipates enhanced permissioning that will check if a user has access to a file when their name is added to the address line of an email containing a link to the file, saving recipients from having to ask for access.
"Adobe is moving toward enabling web-based workflows in addition to the cloud in leading applications like Photoshop. It’s an exciting time to see how we can unlock the power of these two platforms, Adobe and Google, in a purely web-based format," Arora concludes. "Adobe is building a platform that allows creativity for anyone, anywhere—however our customers work."