• 2.1 million Add-on installations

• 8x lift in productivity by streamlining collaboration

• Add-on enables seamless sharing and feedback across teams

These insights inspired Adobe to partner with Google in 2020 to develop an Add-on for Google Workspace. 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, research by Pfeiffer Consulting 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.

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.

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.”