We’d really appreciate your thoughts on how we can make this newsletter work best for you.

- The G Suite Team

November 1, 2016

Note: On September 29, 2016, "Google Apps for Work" was renamed as “G Suite.” Original references to the names "Google Apps" or "Google Apps for Work" have been updated to reflect this change.

Featured launch: Achieve your goals with G Suite

Five new ways to reach your goals faster with G Suite

What’s new: One of the core promises of Google Docs is to help you and your team go from collecting ideas to achieving your goals as quickly and easily as possible. That’s why last month we launched Explore in Docs, Sheets and Slides — with machine intelligence built right in — to help your team create amazing presentations, spreadsheets and documents in a fraction of the time it used to take.

With this launch, we introduced five new time-saving features designed to speed up and simplify the way you work, so you can focus on bringing your team’s ideas to life.

1. Spend less time figuring out who owns what with Action Items

According to research by the McKinsey Global Institute, employees spend about 20 percent of their work week — nearly an entire day — searching for details internally and tracking down colleagues for answers. This can be especially true when a document is full of ideas, requests and comments, making it difficult to get a clear sense of who’s responsible for what.

To help keep your projects moving, when you type phrases like “Ryan to follow up on the keynote script,” or “Andrea to schedule a weekly check in” on desktop, Docs will intelligently suggest an Action Item to assign to the right person, thanks to Natural Language Processing (NLP).

You can also manually assign an Action Item to someone in the Docs, Sheets and Slides desktop and mobile apps by mentioning their name in a comment and checking the new Action Item box. The assignee will get an email notification and see the Action Item(s) clearly highlighted with a blue bar when they open the file.

2. Spend less time searching for the files that need attention

Once Action Items have been assigned, it’s easy for team members to identify documents, spreadsheets and presentations that need their attention. The next time they visit Docs, Sheets, Slides (or Drive) from their laptops or mobile apps, they’ll see a badge on any files with Action Items assigned to them, plus any unresolved suggestions that others have made to their files.

3. Spend less time building questions with smarter Forms

Since its launch in 2008, more than a billion questions have been asked in Forms, allowing us to identify common patterns, like question types and the response options that usually go with them. With the help of neural networks, we can now predict the type of question you’re asking and suggest potential responses for you to choose from, giving you back about 25 percent of the time you used to spend creating a Form.

Let’s say you’re planning an all-day event at the office and need to know which day works best for your team. When you type “What days are you available next week?” Forms will intelligently determine that “Checkbox” is the ideal question type, and generate related response options that you can add one by one or all together.

Also debuting today is a top-requested feature from our business and education customers — the new “File upload” question type. Your respondents can now upload files from their computer or Drive — all of which are neatly collected for you in a new Drive folder. Note: This feature is only available for G Suite customers in Forms shared within their organization.

4. Spend less time typing with a set of new voice commands

Last year, we launched Voice typing in Docs on the web to help you capture ideas, big and small, without lifting a finger. With this launch, we’re adding more ways to format and customize content with commands for changing text color, deleting words, inserting links and comments, plus a number of other ways to format, hands-free.

5. Spend less time switching between apps to get things done

We want you to be as productive and collaborative as possible, regardless of the tools you choose to work with, so we’ve partnered with Slack to make it even easier to work with Google Docs files. With a click of the "+" button in Slack, you can bring files from Drive directly into a conversation with your team, or create new Docs, Sheets and Slides files right from Slack. You can check out more details on Slack’s blog.

With the introduction of Explore, and more and more updates to products that build in machine intelligence, taking back time spent on mundane, repetitive tasks will only get easier with G Suite. Now, you can focus your energy on creative and strategic work, not busy work.

Work anywhere

Learn about your co-workers in the context of the apps you use every day

Transfer data from one user to another with the Google Admin app for Android

What’s new: You can now transfer data from one user to another in the Google Admin Android app, much like you can in the web-based Admin console. The process can be initiated from the User List page or the User Details page and can be done as a standalone action, before suspending a user, or before deleting a user. Just like on the web, you can transfer Google Drive files and Google+ pages.

For more detailed instructions, check out the Help Center.

Simple to use 

Integrated search now available in Gmail, Calendar, Groups, and Drive on the web

What’s new: One common request we’ve heard from customers is for an integrated search experience for the content you care about, regardless of what app you’re in. With this launch, we’ve added an integrated search experience in Gmail, Google Calendar, Groups, and Drive on the web for G Suite Basic and G Suite Business customers to make finding the content you care about easier.

This new search experience uses Google’s latest technologies to make searching for content more intelligent than ever. The search results you’ll see will change depending on what you’re trying to accomplish and also which services are enabled for your domain. Typically, search results in the top portion will be the same type as the application you’re using, and below, you’ll see related documents, contacts, calendar events, or emails that are most relevant to what you’re searching for.

Please note: At this time, the integrated search experience is available only to G Suite Basic and G Suite Business customers. 

Page numbers now in table of contents in Google Docs

What’s new: The table of contents in Google Docs makes it easy to organize and navigate long and complex documents. With this launch, you now have the option to include page numbers in these tables, a frequent request from G Suite customers.

To do so, simply select the numbered option when inserting a table of contents from the Insert menu.

Check out the Help Center for more information.

Business ready

Email notifications now available for your admin quarantines

What’s new: Many administrators who use admin quarantines have requested email notifications when mail messages are quarantined. With this launch, we’ve added a new setting in the admin quarantine that will let you do just that. These email notifications will make it easier to quickly take action on certain email quarantines which may be more severe than others.

Based on your organization’s needs, you can enable notifications per each quarantine. Once enabled, admins will receive an email notification within an hour of when an email is quarantined. The frequency and timing of the alerts will vary based on how often new quarantined mail arrives, but will never be more than once hourly. We recommend only enabling email notifications for the quarantines that need to be actioned immediately.

New Look and Feel

Also, the admin quarantine is getting a new look and feel to make the quarantine logs easier to read. If you have additional suggestions, please send us feedback about this new look using the “Send feedback” link.

 Check out the Help Center for more information on admin quarantines.

Helping users recover their password with recovery email addresses

What’s new: If your domain has enabled non-admin user password recovery from the Admin console, then you may have decreased your help desk tickets by giving users an automated way to reset their password. With this launch, we’ve extended non-admin user password recovery to include email addresses, an extension to our phone numbers launch from last year.

Getting Started

Non-admin user password recovery launched over a year ago as default OFF for new G Suite domains, and you can enable the feature by Organizational Unit from the Admin console under Security settings.

Security Best Practices

If you’ve enabled this feature for your domain, we’d like to remind you of the following resources for administrators we’ve updated with this launch:

• Employee departure security best practices
• Set password strength and user password recovery

Note: For G Suite for Education domains that are Primary/Secondary institutions, only administrators will be shown the prompt for email address and phone number.

Updates to Gmail’s SMTP Relay abuse detection

What’s new: If your organization uses non-Gmail email server software, you can use the SMTP relay service setting to route outgoing mail through Google. This setting enables you to filter messages for spam and viruses before they reach external contacts and to apply G Suite email security settings to outgoing messages. However, if a spammer is able to get the username and password of a user at your domain, they may also be able to use the SMTP relay service to send messages on behalf of your domain.

With this launch, when Gmail detects abuse of the SMTP relay service by a domain’s user, we will now send admins a list of the users affected as well as some steps to identify why this problem is occurring. If a user is affected by this issue, admins should run virus scans on all of the user’s devices and make sure that their password is changed to prevent further abuse. It’s important to action these messages as soon as possible, because spam messages from these accounts can damage your domain’s email reputation to other mail providers and could have other negative effects on your mail flow.

This is our first step to let administrators know when we’ve detected abuse. We will be looking for other ways to keep your domain’s email reputation safe in the future.

Check out the Help Center for more information.

Google Cloud Directory Sync v4.4.19: A new name and other updates

What’s new: In September, we introduced Google Cloud, a portfolio of products, technologies, and services designed for enterprises. Following that announcement, we’re rebranding our Google Apps Directory Sync tool to better reflect the wide variety of products and services it supports. Going forward, Google Apps Directory Sync will be known as Google Cloud Directory Sync. In addition to this change, the latest version of Google Cloud Directory Sync will include the features and fixes described below.

What’s new

• The GCDS interface now shows only those sync features supported by your domain type.
• The tool uses the latest Java JRE v1.8, which by default uses TLS v1.2 for HTTPS connections.
• The GCDS EULA has been updated to include customers who may use a domain covered by the Managed Google Domain Terms.

What’s fixed

• “Force new users to change password” is now properly set on account creation.
• Group memberships are now added properly on initial sync with group creation.
• Instead of displaying “Connected failed - null” when there is a connection error testing SMTP notifications, GCDS now displays a proper error message.
• Random passwords for accounts are no longer synced on the first and subsequent syncs; they are now set on the first sync only.
• Users are now properly provisioned with the defined default password.
• You can now re-authorize GCDS using a different account, even if GCDS has a valid auth token.
• You can now perform a sync in GCDS, even if you haven’t configured email notification settings.
• Instead of displaying the raw HTML EULA when installing from the command line, the installer now displays the plain text EULA.

Check out the Help Center for more details, and download the latest version of GCDS.

Create custom user attributes in the Admin console

What’s new: You have long been able to add, edit, and view various details about a user in the Admin console, from basic information like name and email address to workplace-focused data like job title, manager, and department. Using the Admin SDK or Google Cloud Directory Sync tool, you could also add custom user attributes to that pre-defined list. With this launch, you can now create and view these custom user attributes directly from the Admin console interface; there’s no need to employ the Admin SDK or GCDS.

For example, you can track the projects an employee is working on or store their hire date—whatever meets your organization’s needs. Moreover, you can determine what type of data should populate each field (e.g. text, numbers, dates, email addresses, etc.) and who can see that data—admins and the individual user only, or all users in your organization. You can then edit and view these details on the User Details page in the Admin console.

For more information on how to add and manage custom user attributes, check out the Help Center.

Administrators can now take action on password-protected office files in Gmail

What’s new: Whether you are in healthcare, financial services, or another regulated industry, G Suite is dedicated to giving administrators more control over their mail. For customers who need to store unencrypted copies of messages for regulatory purposes, a new attachment compliance filter for Gmail is being released that will allow you to specify rules for how to handle password protected office files.

With this launch, you now have a new option in the attachment compliance filters which detects whether an attached office file, such as a Microsoft Office or LibreOffice document, is password protected, and therefore encrypted. From there, you can define what action to take on the message. For example, you can reject messages, detect particular attachment types or names, re-route the message, add a header, or prepend a string to the subject. You can also modify a message by stripping its attachments and adding an advisory notice to the message. The compliance filter is only triggered by whether the attachment is password-protected or not.

Many G Suite customers have already deployed Advanced Gmail filters from the Admin console in order to meet their specific IT security requirements.

To learn more, visit our Help Center article on how to Set up filters for attachment compliance.

Bulk enrollment of company-owned Android devices

What’s new: In October 2015, we introduced the ability to manage company-owned devices running Android 6.0 (Marshmallow). That launch included several new settings, including device lockdowns, account management, sharing freedom, application management, and factory reset protection. With this launch, we’re going even further to make it easy to manage your company-owned Android devices.

First, you can now bulk enroll your Android inventory and deploy it to remote offices with your chosen settings enforced. Moreover, during the bulk import process, you can now associate your company-owned devices with a new attribute called an asset tag to better integrate with internal tracking and billing tools.

Second, the mobile inventory page in the Admin console (Device management > Mobile devices) now features improved filtering around device ownership and device actions, like blocking and wiping.

Finally, all admin activities around the management of company-owned devices—like bulk import and device actions—are now logged in the Admin Audit section of the Admin console (Reports > Audit > Admin), while all end user activities on company-owned devices—like OS updates, setting changes, and app installs and removals—are now tracked in Mobile Audit (Reports > Audit > Mobile Devices). Most importantly, you can now choose to receive a monthly report to help you monitor company-owned devices that have been inactive in the last 30 days.

Note: Support for company-owned devices is provided to G Suite Business customers only.

For more information, check out the Help Center.

Learn more about G Suite

Google Cloud Connect (GCC): The official community for G Suite Admins

The G Suite Show on YouTube, every Tuesday, 11am PST

What’s New for G Suite Admins videos

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We’d really appreciate your thoughts on how we can make this work best for you.