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

-The Google Apps Team

May 4, 2015

Featured Launch: Self-service password recovery

Self-service password recovery for Google Apps

Released April 2, 2015                                     Share with your organization  

What’s new: Password recovery can be a frustrating and time-consuming activity for both Google Apps admins and the people in their domains who have been locked out of their accounts. With this launch, we’ve given admins the option to reduce their workload, and save time for those who have been locked out of their accounts, by enabling the ability for non-admins to reset their own passwords.

How it works: This new feature is defaulted off and can be enabled from the Admin console at: Security > Basic settings > Password management. In the Password recovery section, click on "Enable/disable non-admin user password recovery."

Non-admins must have set up a recovery phone in order to reset their own password. Admins should check the Help Center for considerations regarding 2-Step Verification, off-boarding, and hijacked accounts before enabling this feature.

Note: this feature is not available for customers using Single Sign-on (SSO).

For more information:

• Help Center - Admins

• Help Center - Users

• Google for Work blog post

Work together

Teaching teams: New ways to work together in Classroom

Released April 21, 2015                                     Share with your organization  

What’s new: Google Classroom allows teachers to spend less time on paperwork and more time with their students. With this launch, multiple teachers can now work and collaborate in a single Classroom class. With the exception of deleting the class altogether, additional teachers can perform all of the same functions as the primary teacher, including:

• Creating assignments and announcements

• Viewing and grading submissions

• Participating in comments on the class’ “stream”

• Inviting students to the class

• Receiving email notifications related to the class

Teachers can also prep for their classes in advance, saving announcements and assignments as “drafts” and waiting to send them until they’re ready. Like in Gmail, once a new announcement or assignment is created, it will be automatically saved as a draft. Those drafts can then be accessed by multiple teachers, making it simple to collaborate on prep work.

Finally, in response to teacher feedback, we’ve made two additional changes that will make Classroom easier to use:

• Autosaving grades - Grades will now be autosaved as they’re entered, meaning teachers can grade assignments over multiple sessions but still return those assignments to students all at one time.

• Improved notifications - Teachers and students will now receive email notifications when private messages are left on assignments.

How it works: Check out the following Help Center articles for more information on these features and how to implement them: Invite teachers to a class, Draft announcements, and Draft assignments.

Work anywhere 

Month view added to Google Calendar app for Android

Released April 8, 2015                                     Share with your organization  

What’s new: We launched the new Google Calendar app for Android last year, helping to save you time and make the most of every day. In February, we launched an updated version containing several additional features based on user feedback. In April, we did the same—adding Month view (back) to the latest version of the Google Calendar app for phones, now available in Google Play.

Month view provides a high-level view of all scheduled events for a full month, allowing people to then tap on a specific day for a closer look. Access to all available views (Schedule, Day, 3 Day, Week, and Month) has also been moved from the overflow menu on the upper right corner into the navigation drawer on the upper left corner. 

In addition, you can now see the color of events when jumping to a particular date from the drop-down in the header.

How it works: Check out the Help Center for more information on using Month view in the Google Calendar app.

Get the Google Calendar app for Android on Google Play

New sharing options, languages, and more with the latest version of the Google Drive Android app

Released April 16, 2015                                     Share with your organization  

What’s new: A new version of the Google Drive Android app is now available on Google Play. The new features include the following:

• After uploading a file, the ability to add people to sharing settings and share a link directly from the upload notification (see image below)

• Ability to access a contact’s extended information from the sharing section of the details pane of a file in Drive
• Ability to remove a parent of a file from the details pane when a file is multi-parented
• Support for 23 new languages (Afrikaans, Amharic, Armenian, Basque, Bengali, Chinese [Hong Kong], Estonian, French [Canada], Galician, Georgian, Icelandic, Kannada, Khmer, Lao, Malayalam, Marathi, Mongolian, Nepali, Sinhala, Swahili, Tamil, Telugu, and Zulu)
• PDF viewer improvements (better scrolling and handling of multi-layout PDFs)
• Performance and UI improvements

How it works: Check out the Help Center for details on all Drive for Android features.

Download the latest Google Drive app on Google Play

Editing and performance improvements in Google Docs editor apps

Released April 16, 2015                                     Share with your organization  

Get the latest Docs, Sheets, and Slides apps on Google Play

Get the latest Docs app in the App Store

Simple to use 

Google+ Photos now in Google Drive

Released April 6, 2015                                     Share with your organization  

See the Help Center for more information on organizing, syncing and deletion options. Get the latest Google Drive apps from Google Play and the App Store.

Animation improvements in Google Slides

Released April 28, 2015                                     Share with your organization  

Business ready 

Google Apps Marketplace post-install notifications

Released early April, 2015                                     Share with your organization  

What’s new: This feature allows Google Apps admins to automatically notify their users of any newly installed app from Google Apps Marketplace. After installing a Marketplace app from the Admin console, admins will have an opportunity to choose whether to send a notification to their users to inform them about the newly available app:

How it works: The notification will only appear to the people in the OU or domain for which the app has been installed. The notification will appear in each person’s Notification Center and will describe how to access and launch the app:

Note that for domains not currently using Google+ and potentially unfamiliar with this kind of notification, the Notification Center icon will appear in the Google One Bar whether admins opt to utilize the post-install notification feature or not. This area will be used for notifications from other Google Apps moving forward.

Learn more in the Help Center.  

Set custom alerts on audit events for Google Apps admins

Released April 8, 2015                                    

What’s new: Admin alerts help give Google Apps admins visibility into important events within their domain, such as potentially suspicious login attempts, or service setting changes by other administrators.

Previously, admins could turn on pre-defined alerts for various user activities, settings changes, and mail flow events. Today we are launching a new feature that allows admins to set up custom alerts for any of the following audit stream types:

• Admin audit

• Tokens audit

• Calendar audit

• Login audit

• Drive audit (Google Drive for Work and Google Apps for Education customers only)

How it works: Custom alerts give admins the flexibility to name and define the triggering audit stream event, add granular criteria like specifying the username of the person who performs the activity (e.g. Alert me when andrew@mycompany.com deletes a calendar) and specify who will receive any corresponding alerts.

Set alerts by clicking the ‘Set Alert’ button on any audit page within the Reports section:

Admins can view and edit custom alerts from the 'Manage alerts' page within the Reports section:

Setting alerts on Drive events:

Google Drive for Work and Google Apps for Education customers will now be able to configure alerts on sensitive Drive events like making a document public or a change in sharing permissions.

Check out the Help Center for more details.

New admin policy and compliance controls for Google Hangouts chat

Released April 8, 2015                                    

What’s New: Google Hangouts provides an end-to-end chat solution for Google Apps customers, allowing people within an organization to securely communicate with one another across all devices and platforms.

With this launch, we added two new policy options for Apps admins to give them greater control of how Hangouts chat is used in their domains, and also introduced Google Apps Vault for Hangouts.

New chat policy options

Admins will now see two new options in the Hangouts chat settings in the Admin console, allowing them to:

• Force Hangouts chat history to be on or off

• Require that only Hangouts, rather than Google Talk, be used

While admins could previously default all Hangouts chat conversation history to on or off, chat participants could change this on a per-conversation basis. With this new feature, admins can ensure chat participants cannot change this setting for new conversations, and for those that need the strongest level of enforcement, participants with History forced on won’t be able to communicate with those that have it forced off.

For end-to-end enforcement of Hangouts chat history policy, the new ‘Hangouts chat only’ option must be selected. The Hangouts chat only option enables admins to give their users a consistent experience across their organization, tailor the compliance settings to meet their precise needs and allows them to provide assistance and support on just a single product. Some instances of chat (like those within Docs, Hangouts video calls and third party apps) currently use Google Talk and won’t be available to ‘Hangouts chat only’ organizations.  

Vault for Hangouts

Google Apps Vault lets you retain, archive, search, and export user data for your eDiscovery and compliance needs. With this launch, we’ll now extend Vault to support Hangouts chat history. For customers already using Vault, full chat retention for all messages will start automatically once chat history is forced on using the new setting.

For more information:

• Help Center: New chat policies

• Help Center: Vault for Hangouts

• Google for Work blog post

Protect Google and Google Apps accounts with Password Alert

Released April 29, 2015                                      Share with your organization  

What’s new: In late April we launched Password Alert, an open-source Chrome extension that helps protect Google and Google Apps Accounts from phishing attacks and encourages people to use different passwords for different sites, a security best practice.

How it works: When an employee with Password Alert installed enters their Google password into any site other than an authentic Google sign-in page (accounts.google.com), that employee will receive an email notifying them to change their password.

In addition, Google Apps admins can choose to deploy an App Engine app that allows for, among other things, auditing and notifications to admins when employees enter their passwords into non-Google websites, and the ability to force those employees to change their passwords after doing so.

As an admin, you can install the Password Alert Chrome extension for all or some members of your domain. To get started with Password Alert, check out the Help Center and FAQ linked below. The Help Center includes a useful Deployment Guide, which outlines the options and requirements for enabling Password Alert for your domain.

Check out the Help Center, FAQ and Google for Work blog post for more information.

Learn more about Google Apps 

Google Apps Learning Center: Top 10 ways to use Google Apps in Manufacturing

Visit the Google Apps Learning Center for more training resources you can share with your users.

Google for Work Connect (GWC): The official community for Apps Admins

Google Apps for all: The Apps Show on YouTube, every Tuesday, 11am PST, with special episodes every Thursday

 Share with your organization       

What’s New for Apps Admins videos

 Share with your organization       

Thanks for checking out our newsletter!

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