Google launched a new Hangout start button for businesses and developers, which can be embedded in any app or website.

Google has already worked with a few enterprise software companies including Zendesk and Freshdesk for customer support hangouts, Zoho for recruiting hangouts, Lucidchart and Smartsheet for document and team collaboration.

“Hangouts change the way employees connect and collaborate,” a spokesperson for Google tells WebProNews. “Both large and small companies like The Weather Channel or Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream — where the company’s COO lives in Los Angeles but is on Hangouts multiple times each day to stay connected with the Ohio-based company and its employees — are making great use of Hangouts to communicate just like in real life. Of course earlier this year we also launched Chromebox for meetings, which runs Hangouts to transform the meeting room experience.”

Chromeboxes come in the form of hardware from companies like Asus and Dell

“Whether you’re a sales rep working in a CRM app or an engineer in a project management tool, it only takes one click to launch a Hangout and your team will automatically be invited,” says Stephen Cho, head of Google Apps and Hangouts Technology Partnerships of the new button. “You can even improve customer service with the ability to quickly launch into a video Hangout with a client to resolve an issue.”

“With this new Hangouts button, apps everywhere will let colleagues, partners, and customers meet face-to-face anytime, anywhere, and work more effectively together with just one click,” he adds.

Here’s a video from Esna showing how you can start a hangout from within Salesforce.

Barb Darrow at GigaOm suggests sites use the feature in place of live chat buttons that are often used throughout the web, though as a commenter points out, website chats don’t typically require a Google account.

Either way, the button provides site owners with a new way to capture engagement on their sites – engagement between colleagues related to your content, or even among friends, depending on just what kind of content you actually provide.

You can find the code for the button here. There is a variety of options, including markup, JavaScript, and HTML5.

Back in November, Google added global address list support to Hangouts for Google Apps users to make it easier for business people to have conversations with their colleagues. They also added settings to let Google Apps admins customize which Hangouts feature were actually available to employees.

Image via YouTube