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- The G Suite Team, Aug 1, 2017

Featured launch: Introducing Hire

A new recruiting app that integrates with G Suite

What’s new: It’s no secret that attracting top talent is a key driver of business success. But whether you’re looking to recruit a business analyst, bring on an assistant or hire an experienced auto mechanic, building the right teams with the right talent takes time and money.

According to a study by Bersin by Deloitte, it takes an average of 52 days to fill an open position and costs about $4,000 to interview, schedule and assess each candidate. At the end of the day, that adds up. Now, Hire–an app designed to help small and medium businesses recruit more effectively–can help.

Recruit better using Hire and G Suite

Hire makes it easy for you to identify talent, build strong candidate relationships and efficiently manage the interview process end-to-end. It integrates seamlessly with G Suite apps like Gmail and Google Calendar, which more than 3 million businesses use, many of them to drive recruiting efforts. With the introduction of Hire, customers now have a hiring app alongside G Suite’s familiar, easy-to-use tools that can help them run an efficient recruiting process.

Hire and G Suite are made to work well together so recruiting team members can focus on their top priorities instead of wasting time copy-pasting across tools. For example, you can:

• Communicate with candidates in Gmail or Hire and your emails will sync automatically in both.
• Schedule interviews in Hire with visibility into an interviewer's schedule from Calendar. Hire also automatically includes important details in Calendar invites, like contact information, the full interview schedule and what questions each interviewer should focus on.
• Track candidate pipeline in Hire, and then analyze and visualize the data in Sheets.

Making intuitive recruiting software for your business

A lot of tools that employees rely on at work are clunky, unintuitive and hard to learn—endless configuration options, tables and lists and mind-numbing data entry. The Hire product team set out to change that. With a mindset of “less is more,” the team conducted hundreds of user-testing sessions and worked with early adopter customers for more than a year to simplify and optimize every aspect of the user experience.

How Hire makes it easy for Brad’s Deals to recruit

Brad’s Deals is a free service that compares online prices to help consumers find the best deals. As a growing organization, recruiting is a top priority for the company. With more than 260 active candidates in their pipeline, Brad’s Deals uses Hire to share candidate information, capture feedback from the interviewing team in one place and track interview progress.

“Hire’s intuitive and simple UI makes it easy for recruiters, hiring managers or even interviewers to take an active part in the recruiting process,” says Jessica Adams, vice president of Human Resources at Brad’s Deals. “The app’s integration with G Suite enables us to quickly access all candidate communications in one place, efficiently schedule interviews and collaborate to reach a hiring decision quickly."

Try Hire today

Hire is the latest product offering from Google to address the talent marketplace. In May, we unveiled Google for Jobs, our initiative that's focused on helping both job seekers and employers, across our products and through deep collaboration with the job matching industry. Google Search connects jobseekers to job opportunities from the open and broad ecosystem of providers, including employer listings as well as LinkedIn, Monster, WayUp, DirectEmployers, CareerBuilder, Glassdoor and Facebook. Hire addresses the needs of our G Suite customers—making it easier to hire the right people.

Now, all U.S.-based businesses under 1,000 employees that use G Suite can purchase Hire to land the best talent. To learn more, visit http://hire.google.com or request a demo at http://hire.google.com/request-demo/.

Note: Hire is available for purchase by G Suite Basic, Business, and Enterprise edition domains in the US with fewer than 1,000 G Suite seats. Hire is not a core G Suite service.

Work together

Send and receive chat messages in Hangouts Meet

What’s new: Sharing written communication is a critical part of successful meetings. Meeting participants may want to share links, chime in when they can't speak, or contribute to the conversation without interrupting the speaker. This chat functionality has been a top feature request in Meet since we launched earlier this year and that’s why, with this launch, we’re bringing it to all G Suite users.

Going forward, meeting attendees will be able to send text and links, all in real time. The chat history will be available for the duration of the meeting.

This feature is available across Meet platforms: chat messages can be sent and received on web and mobile (versions 4.5 and above), and received on Chromebox for Meetings. All users can send and receive messages while in Meet, including those not signed in with Google accounts.

Check out the Help Center for more information.

Object duplication, faster sharing, and more with the latest Jamboard release

What’s new: Following its official launch back in May, Jamboard is helping businesses collaborate more efficiently by bringing the power of the cloud into their team brainstorms. With this launch, we’ve added several helpful features to both the Jamboard device and app to make this experience even more productive.

Object duplication

Users can now duplicate objects - on both their Jamboard device and app - by selecting an object and clicking on the duplicate icon in the upper right-hand corner.

Smoother typing

A new keyboard on the Jamboard device allows users to input text using Glide Typing, in addition to regular typing.

Easier object selection

The functionality of the Lasso selection tool has been expanded, allowing users to select both drawings and objects like post-its, stickers, and images and easily move or resize them.

Faster sharing

The “Add people” dialog in the Jamboard app now auto-suggests contacts based on history, matching address book contacts, and the user’s email domain.

For a full list of new features and improvements from this month’s release, check out the What’s New in Jamboard page in the Help Center. These features will roll out gradually over the coming week.  

An improved third-party sharing experience in Google Drive

What’s new: We know that many of your organizations work with contractors, vendors, and other third parties who don’t have Google accounts, and we recognize that it’s crucial you’re empowered to share information with them in a quick, easy, and secure way. That’s why, in response to your feedback, we made changes to the experience users have when sharing Google files with non-Google accounts.

Previous sharing experience

Previously, if you allowed users to share files outside of your domain and send sharing invitations to non-Google accounts, an employee could share a file stored in Google Drive with any non-Google user. If you allowed external users to preview files, that non-Google user could view the file for 14 days. If you required Google sign-in for external users, that non-Google user was prompted to create a Google account within 14 days in order to view the file. Some third parties, however, don’t have permission to create such accounts or didn’t do so in time, meaning your employee’s information didn’t get to their intended recipient.

Of course, if you also allowed users to publish files on the web, your employee had another option—he or she could simply share the public link. Unfortunately, many users didn’t take advantage of this option, because it’s not clearly surfaced as part of the sharing flow.

New sharing experience

To make this process easier and more effective for both G Suite and non-Google users alike, we added an option to the sharing dialogue for users to let anyone with the link view the file.

This option only appears if ALL of the following are true of your sharing settings (Apps > G Suite > Drive and Docs > Sharing settings):

1. You allow users to share files outside of your domain.
2. You allow users to send sharing invitations to non-Google accounts.
3. You allow users to publish files on the web.
4. You do NOT have “Recipients only” selected in your Access Checker settings.

An example of the new dialogue that will appear when an employee shares a file with a non-Google account, provided the conditions above are met.

If an employee selects this option to “Send the link,” link sharing is turned on for that file and anyone with the link will be able to view the file. This allows third parties to access important content with no deadline and no need to create a Google account.

Note that the option to “Send an invitation” will remain the default selection for other files.

These changes are now in effect for domains on the Rapid Release track and will go into effect in early August for domains on the Scheduled Release track.

Check out the Help Center for more information on setting file sharing permissions.

Simple to use 

Smarter Google Forms to save you time

What’s new: Google Forms makes it easy to collect information, plan events, solicit feedback, and more. With this launch, we’re adding new features and using machine learning to make Forms work better for your business. Read on for more details.

Intelligent response validation

When you know the specific type of answer you’re looking for, it’s often helpful to validate responses in Forms. For example, if you’re asking for a website, Forms can double-check that the answer provided is a URL. Following this launch, when we can, we’ll suggest response validation based on the question you ask. If you ask respondents for their age, for instance, we may recommend validating that the answer they provide is a whole number.

Cross-domain file uploads

Oftentimes, when you use Forms, you’re not collecting data from your colleagues—you’re gathering information from third parties, customers, and more. To guarantee you get the information you need, we’ll now allow users outside of your domain to upload files as responses to your questions—provided both of your organizations allow cross-domain sharing in Google Drive. Based on usage patterns, total uploads to new forms will be capped at 1GB, with an option to increase that limit to 1TB. Uploads to existing forms will be capped at 1TB.

Preferences

If you use similar settings across all of your forms, you can now save time by assigning default settings to apply to any new forms you create. For instance, you can choose to always collect email addresses, make questions required every time, and assign default quiz point values.

“Checkbox grid” questions

Sometimes a question is more complex than multiple choice or checkbox answers alone can satisfy—you need to be able to select multiple options from multiple categories. Going forward, you can use the “Checkbox grid” question type to get the answers you need, like dates and times that work for an upcoming meeting.

Section reordering

We heard you loud and clear—you need an easy way to organize (and reorganize) your questions in Forms. In response to your feedback, we’re now making it possible to reorder whole sections quickly and easily.

Create better forms, more quickly, with these new and intelligent features in Forms.

Check out the Help Center for more information: Edit your form | Choose a question for your form

Changing the default order of apps in the Google app launcher

What’s new: The app launcher in the Google Bar makes it easy for users to quickly access Google apps like Drive, Gmail, and Calendar. Savvy users can even customize the launcher to place the apps they use most at the top and they apps they visit less often at the bottom.

We want to make the app launcher more convenient for new users and those who don’t take the time to customize it. To do this, we’re introducing a new default order for apps in the launcher, which will more prominently feature commonly used apps like Gmail, Drive, and Docs.

This new layout will only go into effect for new users and those who haven’t already customized their app launcher. If a user has already reordered the apps in their launcher, he or she won’t see any changes to the apps’ order.

Learn more about the Google Bar in the Help Center.

Find exactly what you want in Google+ with new search options and filters

What’s new: In July we rolled out a few updates to Google+ to help your users find the content they’re looking for. From an updated look of the search interface to search suggestions and domain-only filters, these new experiences can make users confident that the content they see is the content they want. Read on for more information.

Suggested and recent searches before users start typing

Before a user begins typing in the search box, we'll show them Communities they may be looking for, as well as recent terms they've searched.

Improved Autocomplete

As the user types, autocomplete results will be shown from Topics, Collections, Communities, and People/Pages.

Filter results by content type using the new tabbed interface

On the search results page, users can now filter content by five categories: “All,” “Posts,” “Communities,” “Collections,” and “People & Pages.”

A popular ask from admins, the “Posts” tab allows users to sort results by new/top posts, as well as by the source of the post (from just you, from people you follow, or from everyone).

Restrict search results and home stream to show only content from within your domain

While offering a mix of external and domain-restricted content can be a valuable aspect of Google+, showing content from people outside of your domain (especially those sourced from users’ personal contacts) can lead to user confusion. That’s why we’re introducing the ability to toggle between showing domain-only content vs. public content in search suggestions, search results, and the Google+ home stream. This feature is currently available on the web only.

With this toggle, users can enjoy the benefits of mixed content while also being able to focus on company-specific info when appropriate. Filtering out external content can increase users’ confidence that they won’t accidentally leak information by commenting on externally visible posts.

We hope that this new experience will make it easier for your users to locate and engage with their Google+ content and Communities.

Check out the Help Center for more information on Google+.

Business ready

Manage access to third-party apps with new G Suite security controls

What’s new: Protecting your organization’s most sensitive data and assets is a constant challenge. G Suite helps protect your data in a number of ways: thwarting attackers with advanced phishing detection through machine learning, mandating strong authentication with security key enforcement and preventing data leakage through tools such as DLP.

With this launch, we're adding another security feature that improves data access control and enhances phishing prevention—OAuth apps whitelisting, giving your organization added visibility and control into how third-party applications are using your data.

New third-party application access controls

OAuth apps whitelisting helps keep your data safe by letting admins specifically select which third-party apps are allowed to access users’ G Suite data. Once an app is part of a whitelist, users can choose to grant authorized access to their G Suite apps data. This prevents malicious apps from tricking users into accidentally granting access to their corporate data.

With these new security controls, an admin can:

1. Get fine-grained visibility into the third-party apps that are accessing G Suite data.

2. Allow access to only trusted and vetted third-party OAuth apps.

3. Guard OAuth access to core G Suite apps data by preventing unauthorized app installs, thus limiting the problems caused by shadow IT.

Once the OAuth whitelisting settings are in place, access to third-party apps is enforced based on the policy set by admins, and employees are automatically protected against unauthorized apps.

Enable OAuth Apps Whitelisting for your domain

Check out instructions on how to get started here. And if you’re interested in learning more about how your business can collaborate, store and communicate securely in G Suite, visit the G Suite Security page.

Learn more about whitelisting connected apps in the Help Center.

Hangouts Meet troubleshooting data to include mobile devices

What’s new: Hangouts Meet allows G Suite administrators to determine whether web video call logs should be uploaded to Google to aid with support troubleshooting. With this update, the Hangouts Meet client logs upload setting in the Admin console will also apply to mobile devices. Such log data allows Google Support to more effectively resolve issues reported by customers to Google Support.

Please review the updated section in the Admin console under Google Hangouts > Meet; your existing setting for Client Logs Upload will continue to remain unchanged unless you choose to modify it.

Please see the configuration in the Admin console and the Help Center for more information.

New Google+ metrics to better track usage and adoption at the user level

What’s new: From sharing updates with teams to offering advice between offices, more and more organizations are adopting Google+ to transform the way they work. In April of this year, we added aggregated Google+ user activity to the Admin console and Reports API, allowing you to track user signups, posts and comments created, and more. With this launch, we’re bringing you even more usage reporting so that you can better understand Google+ adoption and engagement in your organization.

Audit Google+ user activity for your organization

To help you get a better sense of the total usage of the product within your organization, we’ve added Google+ user activity data to the auditing section of the Admin console, as well as to the Reports API.

Now, G Suite admins will be able to see when the following events are performed in Google+ in their organization right in the audit logs:

• Post created
• Post edited
• Post deleted
• Comment created
• Comment edited
• Comment deleted
• +1 added to a post
• +1 added to a comment
• +1 removed from a post
• +1 removed from a comment
• Poll vote added
• Poll vote removed

Better understand how your users are engaging with Google+ and see which users are most active

Going forward, you can also track the following metrics in the apps usage activity report and aggregate reports in the Admin console or via the Reports API:

• Number of activities performed per day by each individual user
• Number of communities where at least one of the community owners is within your domain
• Number of collections within your organization

These metrics, as well as user-level metrics for all G Suite apps, can now also be viewed for a chosen date in the past.

In the future, we’ll continue to bring even more tools to help you manage Google+ usage within your organization. We’re always working to provide admins with the visibility they need, so please let us know what you think and stay tuned for more updates.

More Information

• Help Center: Google+ audit log
• Help Center: Apps usage activity reports
• Help Center: Aggregate reports
• Help Center: Account activity reports
• Help Center: Security reports
  

Set automated rules for mobile devices to protect your data

What’s new: Protecting your organization’s data should be easy, regardless of what device your employees use. This is especially true if many of them use mobile devices at work. With this launch, we’re introducing new device rules for Mobile Management that provide better proactive management of mobile devices within your domain.

G Suite admins can now define custom rules that trigger on device events, and have associated actions. When an event specified in a rule occurs on a device within your organization with a G Suite Enterprise license, the corresponding action you have set will automatically be executed by Mobile Management.

Some examples of event/action-based rules you can set include:

• Approve select mobile devices at the time of device enrollment.
• Block access to corporate data if user installs a specific app.
• Block access to/Account wipe the device if user has more than five failed screen unlock attempts.
• Block access to/Account wipe the device if there is suspicious activity found on the device.

If you’re looking for a device rule that isn’t covered in an existing template, you can customize your own rule. Previously, you would have needed to create a custom script and leverage our APIs to automate any mobile device actions.

Our goal with this launch is to automate the manual, repetitive tasks you often execute as mobile administrators while also keeping your organization’s data protected.

Get started today with the instructions in this Help Center article.

Better experience for SMS 2-Step Verification users with Google prompt

What’s new: In February 2017, we revamped Google prompt for 2-Step Verification (2-SV), giving users a better option to keep their accounts safe. In addition to offering 2-SV over an encrypted connection, Google prompt also allows users to block unauthorized access to their account with real-time security information about the login attempt.

With this launch, 2-SV SMS users will see an invitation to try Google prompts when they sign in. The invitation will give users a way to preview the new Google prompts sign in flow instead of SMS, and, afterward, choose whether to keep it enabled or opt-out.

Overall, this is being done because SMS text message verifications and one-time codes are more susceptible to phishing attempts by attackers. By relying on account authentication instead of SMS, administrators can be sure that their mobile policies will be enforced on the device and authentication is happening through an encrypted connection.

Notes:

• The notifications to test Google prompts will be shown only to 2-SV SMS users. Security key users are unaffected by this change.
• A data connection is required to use Google prompt.
• iOS users will need the Google Search app installed on their phone to use Google prompt.
• Enterprise edition domains also have the ability to enforce security keys for more advanced security requirements.
• While users may opt out of using phone prompts when shown the promotion, users will receive follow-up notifications to switch after 6 months.

Check out the Help Center for more information.

Making 2-Step Verification deployment easier

What’s new: Security Key Enforcement was launched in January 2017 and allows a G Suite Enterprise domain admin to enforce the use of security keys as a two-factor authentication option to protect users against phishing. In addition to security key enforcement, G Suite domain admins also have the options of other 2SV methods such as the Google Authenticator app, text message, or phone call. To make 2SV deployment easier at your domain, we've added two new options in the Admin console:

Admin-led security key enrollment for end-users: Admins can now enroll security keys on behalf of their users. After navigating to the User page from Admin console, click ADD NEW KEY, and you can add a new security using the standard security key enrollment process.

2SV enrollment periods: Currently, whenever a new user is created in an organizational unit where two-step verification (2SV) is enforced, that user has to use 2SV from his or her first login. From administrator feedback, we found that enrollment periods would help onboarding users to 2SV more efficiently.

Going forward, administrators can now specify an enrollment period from the Admin console, during which newly created users can sign in with just their passwords and complete their 2SV setup.

To learn more, check out our updated Set up 2-Step Verification guide in the Help Center.

Manage legal matters and holds programmatically with the Google Vault API

What’s new: Google Vault can help your organization meet its legal needs by offering an easy way to preserve and retrieve user data. To harness the full potential of Vault, however, you may need to integrate its functionality with other tools and processes that your business employs. With this launch, we’re making that possible with the Google Vault API.

The Vault API will allow you to programmatically manage legal matters and holds. This means that you will be able to create, list, update, and delete matters and holds related to data supported by Vault.

We’ll add more features to the API in the future, so stay tuned.

For more information on the Vault API, check out the Developer’s Guide.

Improvements to Google Calendar Interop for Microsoft Exchange, with real time data, logging, and simpler setup

What’s new: With this launch, we’re making it easier to manage the coexistence of Google Calendar and Microsoft Exchange Server (including Office 365) within your organization. We’re starting by supporting real-time free/busy lookups between the two systems within the same organization on both mobile and web. This has been a popular feature request from customers with hybrid G Suite - Microsoft Exchange environments.

Making collaboration between your users simpler

Once Calendar Interop is set up for your domain, end users will be able to see each other’s free/busy information across the two systems. This information will be available to users in Google Calendar’s Find a Time and Microsoft Outlook’s Scheduling Assistant. Calendar Interop works in real time and is supported on Google Calendar for Android, iOS and web.

Easy setup and troubleshooting

As G Suite admins, you can enable user availability lookups by visiting Apps > G Suite > Settings for Calendar in the Admin console and selecting Calendar Interop management.

From there, you can set up interoperability between Google Calendar and Microsoft Exchange using our robust setup guide in the Help Center.

In addition, to help you set up and maintain interoperability, we are providing you with two new tools:

1. We’ve built a new interoperability troubleshooting tool that allows administrators to understand the status of the setup with one click. If everything’s working as expected, the tool will let you know. If something’s amiss, it will display a detailed human-readable error to help you pinpoint the root cause of the issue.

2. We’re also exposing interoperability-related logs in the reporting section in Admin console so that admins can track interoperability-related successes and failures for each user separately.

Admins who have already set up Calendar interoperability will want to migrate to this new setup. Check out the Help Center for detailed steps on how to migrate.

For more information on Calendar Interop and how to get started, visit the Help Center.

Learn more about G Suite

Updated G Suite Admin Fundamentals course now available on Coursera

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

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.