To help you better track the full breadth of G Suite launches, including those that aren’t announced on the G Suite Updates blog, check out the What’s new in G Suite page in the Help Center.

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

- The G Suite Team, October 1, 2018

Featured launch: Live stream Hangouts Meet meetings

Now up to 100,000 in-domain users can watch meetings

What’s new: Many companies have important meetings that require delivering a message to large groups of people, like a company-wide all-hands or onboarding training. Now, G Suite Enterprise users can live stream Meet meetings to support these needs.

Meeting organizers in G Suite Enterprise domains can enable live streaming on their meeting in Calendar and invite their audience.

With the stream URL, up to 100,000 in-domain users can watch the meeting from the web or their mobile device. Support for watching live streams on Hangouts Meet hardware will be coming soon. When ready, meeting participants can start the live stream to allow everyone to watch.

The ability to add live streaming to a meeting can be controlled per organizational unit (OU) from the Admin console. To do this, open the Admin console and go to Apps > G Suite > Google Hangouts and click “Meet settings.” Here, toggle “Let people stream their meetings.” This setting is ON by default.

For more information on live streaming video meetings, check out the Help Center.

Work together

New ways to create, edit, and share your jams on the web

What’s new: With this month’s release, we’ve added two highly requested features from customers that help you jam from anywhere and give you more control when sharing your work: creating and editing jams from the web and a “View Only” mode.

Create and edit your jams in a web browser

While users have always been able to view a jam from any device, editing and collaborating on a jam has been limited to touch devices (like the physical kiosk, tablets, and smartphones).

Now, you can create and edit your jams on the web too. With the new updates to the Jamboard web experience, everybody on your team can join in and collaborate on a session in their web browser. This means that anybody in the meeting can participate, whether they want to edit a sketch from a laptop or quickly type up sticky notes during a brainstorm.

We’ve found that this makes using and adopting Jamboard much easier for most teams and organizations.

Share and protect your work with View Only mode

Sometimes you want to share something to collaborate, but other times you want to share something that’s complete. Perhaps it’s an early brainstorm that you just want your manager to be able to view, or perhaps you’re a teacher sharing an assignment that you don’t want students to edit or change. With View Only mode, you can share something broadly but set exactly who has edit access.

The feature looks and works similarly to other G Suite apps like Docs, Sheets and Slides, so you have a consistent experience no matter what you’re creating and sharing.

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.

Real-time presence in Microsoft Office to become available October 17th

What’s new: On October 17th, 2018, we’ll begin rolling out real-time presence for Microsoft Office files in Google Drive to all G Suite domains. Admin controls for real-time presence are available today.

This feature, included in Drive File Stream, will help you avoid version conflicts when editing Microsoft Office files in Google Drive. Real-time presence will let users know if another user is editing a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file stored in Drive File Stream, in real time. This feature will start rolling out to end users on October 17th.

Avoid version conflicts when editing Microsoft Office files in Drive

Real-time presence will check to see if someone else is viewing or editing a Microsoft Office file while you have it open. It’ll alert you and them to help avoid version conflicts. When conflicts do occur, it’ll help you resolve them with a side-by-side view of the document versions, allowing you to easily merge them into one up-to-date file. For more details and to fully understand the feature:

• See this demo recorded at Google Cloud Next 2018.
• Read our previous blog post describing the feature.

Admin controls available now

Admins can choose whether to make real-time presence available to their organizations. Admin controls are live today and on by default. Real-time presence can be disabled for an entire domain or for individual organizational units (OUs) within a domain. To change the setting, go to Apps > G Suite > Drive and Docs > Features and Applications > Allow users to enable real-time presence in Microsoft Office from Drive File Stream in the Admin console.

For more granular control, admins can also deploy a configuration setting to enable or disable real-time presence in Microsoft Office on a per-machine basis.

End user feature available after October 17th

On October 17th, Drive File Stream users will begin to see an educational message when opening Office files stored in Drive File Stream. This message (pictured below), explains that real-time presence helps users see who is editing Microsoft Office files stored in Drive. After opting in to this feature, users will begin to see real-time presence status indicators in the bottom right-hand corner of Word, Excel, and Powerpoint windows that are focused in the foreground.

On macOS, enabling real-time presence may require users to grant accessibility permissions. Additionally, some users may be asked to confirm their identity before using real-time presence, by logging in with their G Suite account. Starting October 17th, employees at G Suite organizations will be able to visit our Help Center to learn more about how to use real-time presence.

Snooze notifications in Hangouts Chat

What’s new: Hangouts Chat makes it easy to collaborate efficiently, but it’s important that you can disconnect without interruptions from Chat messages. You can now snooze notifications, allowing other users to know that you are checking messages on your own time.

You can choose the time frame that best suits your needs from the options of 30 minutes or one, two, four or eight hours. During this time, notifications will be muted on all your devices. Other people will see your presence indicator change to a moon and a status line next to your name letting them know when they can expect you to be responsive again.

Use our Help Center to find out more about snoozing notifications.

Third-party conferencing available in Google Calendar

What’s new: We’re adding native support for third-party conferencing tools in Google Calendar with Calendar add-ons. These add-ons allow a user to create, view and join a third-party video conference directly from a Calendar event without requiring a Chrome extension or download.

Users can simply click a link in the Calendar invite to join on web or mobile.

We launched with five partners whose add-ons are available in the G Suite Marketplace, with more to come in the future:

• Cisco (Webex integration)
• Dialpad (UberConference integration)
• LogMeIn (GoToMeeting integration)
• RingCentral (RingCentral integration)
• Vonage (Vonage integration)

G Suite admins can install these add-ons for their entire domains or selected organization units. End users can also install these add-ons directly.

Once installed, users can use add-ons to seamlessly add third-party conference details to newly created Calendar events. Other guests on these events will be able to see the third-party conferences and join them, even if they don’t have those particular add-ons installed.

Learn more about third-party conferencing add-ons in the Help Center.

Simple to use

Smart Compose in Gmail now available for G Suite

What’s new: We’ve already made it easier to reply to emails; we’re now making it easier to compose them. Smart Compose in Gmail, now available to G Suite users, intelligently autocompletes your emails. At launch, it can fill in common phrases and relevant addresses, like that of your home and office; in the future, it will get smarter—learning your most-used greetings.

Smart Compose is on by default for all G Suite users. They can turn it off in their Gmail general settings (Smart Compose > Writing suggestions off).

Visit the Help Center for more details on how to use Smart Compose.

Google Sheets Salesforce add-on moving from beta to GA

What’s new: As we recently announced, we’re making our add-on for Google Sheets to connect with Salesforce generally available. You can use it to import data and reports from Salesforce into Sheets and to push updates you make in Sheets back to Salesforce. This seamless integration will help optimize workflows and reduce duplicate work between the two products.

See our beta launch announcement for more details on the add-on and how you might use it. We hope it will help you operate more efficiently.

Get and use the Salesforce add-on for Google Sheets

• End users can install “Data connector for Salesforce” from the G Suite Marketplace.
• G Suite admins can deploy the add-on to their entire domain.

As a G Suite admin you can control access to this add-on the same way you can any other Sheets add-on.

• If you have add-ons disabled for your domain but want to allow your users to use this specific add-on, you can whitelist this add-on.
• If you want to control add-ons across your domain, see disable or enable add-ons overall in Docs editors.

See our Help Center for more details on how to import, edit and sync Salesforce data with Google Sheets.

New intelligent file suggestions and organization with Priority in Drive Beta

What’s new: We’re adding a new page in Google Drive’s left-hand navigation panel that helps you find and take action on the right Drive files at the right time. This Priority page uses machine learning to suggest files you might need to work on and has “workspaces” to help you organize files. Priority in Drive is initially available in beta. See below for more details.

See files and comments that need attention

The goal of Priority is to put your most important files in one place. Using machine learning, we identify the files that are high-priority for you to work on. When you open the page, you’ll see those files, along with comments and suggested actions. You’ll be able to reply to some comments directly through the Drive interface and open full documents with one click. This will help you spend less time searching for content and more time doing work that matters.

Use workspaces to organize files without moving them

The Priority page also organizes files into workspaces. These let you gather a private set of working files for ongoing easy access. Adding files to a workspace doesn’t affect their storage location or permissions—it just aggregates files to help you find them faster. Our studies show most users only work with around 10–20 files at any given time. Workspaces help make sure you can get to those files more efficiently. To build your workspace, you can use Drive's intelligent file suggestions or add files manually.

With the Priority page, Drive is helping you save time and focus on what matters by intelligently surfacing and organizing the files you may need in any given moment.

Apply to join the Priority in Drive Beta

Priority in Drive is launching initially in beta. Admins can see more details, review the eligibility requirements, and apply for their domains to join at this link.

Business ready

New G Suite adoption and productivity insights tool launching in beta

What’s new: We’re launching Work Insights, a new tool to help you quickly assess the impact of G Suite on your organization by giving you visibility into the adoption of G Suite tools. Initially launching in beta, Work Insights is available to organizations with G Suite Enterprise or Enterprise for Education editions. G Suite admins can use this form to apply for the beta.

See the impact of G Suite in your organization

With Work Insights, we aim to bring you executive-level insights into how G Suite is increasing collaboration and improving workplace culture at your organization. Use the Work Insights dashboard to see how your organization’s G Suite usage is changing over time in the following areas:

• Adoption - which teams are adopting G Suite and which apps they use most frequently
• Collaboration - how are teams working together through meetings, file sharing, and document co-editing
• Activity - which apps teams are spending time in and how much time they’re spending in meetings

The metrics in the dashboard can help you determine how quickly your workforce is adopting G Suite, how teams are collaborating, if they’re using G Suite products as expected, and if you need additional training resources to help users understand a new workflow.

Compare across your organization

For each category of metrics, you can compare insights by organizational unit. You can also benchmark usage and adoption by comparing team-level statistics to overall company data. This can help you establish usage trends and see adoption patterns to get insights into differences across your organization.

Note that at the organizational level, team insights will only be shown for teams of 10 people or more.

See how G Suite is used across your organization

See how teams within your organization collaborate

Work Insights Beta now open

Work Insights is initially launching in beta to organizations with G Suite Enterprise and Enterprise for Education editions only, with access restricted to admins. See this form for more details and to apply.

Whitelist third-party bots for Hangouts Chat

What’s new: We’re adding the option for you, as a G Suite admin, to whitelist specific bots for Hangouts Chat for your organization. This new setting will apply in Chat beginning October 10th, 2018.

When we announced Hangouts Chat earlier this year, we introduced bots. Bots provide a conversational way for you to connect to services in Chat, such as looking up information, scheduling meetings, performing tasks, and so on. Bots can be created by Google, users in your domain, or third parties.

We’ve heard from you that you’d like more granularity over which third-party bots your users can interact with in Chat. In addition to the option in the Admin console to turn bots on or off for your domain, you can now enable specific third-party bots individually in the G Suite Marketplace settings.

Full instructions on how to whitelist bots can be found in the Help Center. While you can start adding bots to a whitelist now, this new setting won’t take effect in Chat until October 10th, 2018.

This means that if you have previously disabled all G Suite Marketplace apps or whitelisted specific apps, the Google Drive bot, Meet bot, and third-party bots will stop working unless you change your G Suite Marketplace settings to allow these.

For more information on using bots in Chat, check out the Help Center.

Investigation tool in G Suite security center now generally available

What’s new: We launched the investigation tool as an Early Adopter Program (EAP) in July and are now making it generally available (GA). It will help G Suite admins and security analysts identify, triage, and remediate security threats within their organization. This tool builds on the existing capabilities in the security center to help admins:

• Identify security issues within their domain using advanced search capability.
• Triage threats targeting users, devices, or data.
• Take bulk actions to limit the propagation and impact of threats.

Since our EAP announcement, we’ve been hard at work using the feedback from participants to improve the product. As a result, this release will have the following key new features:

• Enhanced security to prevent insider risk - You can now require a second admin to verify large actions in the investigation tool.
• More fine-grained visibility while investigating incidents - Email header analysis allows you to see important attributes and the delivery path for the email. We’ve also added visibility into Team Drive settings and the ability to modify access permissions directly from the tool.
• Simplified interface - With user auto-complete, emails and names from your organization will be auto-completed as you type parameters in the investigation tool.

We hope the investigation tool helps you manage your organization’s data security. See the Help Center for more information on the tools available to provide visibility into security issues in your domain.

Nine third-party apps added to the G Suite pre-integrated SAML apps catalog

What’s new: With Single-Sign-On (SSO), users can access all of their enterprise cloud applications —including the Admin console for admins—after signing in just one time. Google supports the two most popular enterprise SSO standards, OpenID Connect and SAML, and there are many applications with pre-integrated SSO support in our third-party apps catalog already.

We’re now adding SAML integration for nine additional applications:

• CloudBees
• Coralogix
• iMeet Central
• monday
• Oomnitza
• OfficeSpace
• Spoke
• Stella Connect
• Wdesk

You can find our full list of pre-integrated applications, as well as instructions for installing them, in the Help Center.

Note that apart from the pre-integrated SAML applications, G Suite also supports installing “Custom SAML Applications,” which means that admins can install any third-party application that supports SAML. The advantage of a pre-integrated app is that the installation is much easier. You can learn more about installing Custom SAML Applications in this Help Center article.

Get a unified view of essential notifications with the alert center beta

What’s new: This month, we launched the alert center for G Suite in beta*. The alert center will offer a single, comprehensive view of essential notifications, alerts, and actions across G Suite. In response to these, admins can take actions to better serve and protect their organizations.

The alert center: a single place for important notifications

The unified view that the alert center provides will help admins manage alerts more efficiently, and provide insights that help them assess their organization's exposure to security issues at the domain and user levels. In addition, G Suite Enterprise edition domains can use the G Suite security center for integrated remediation of issues surfaced by alerts.

A sample view of the new G Suite alert center

Notifications within the alert center can be broadly categorized into three groups: security threats, monitoring, and critical system alerts. At the beta launch, the alert center will include these specific alerts:

• Google Operations - provides information about G Suite security and privacy issues that Google is investigating that may impact your organization's G Suite services.
• Gmail phishing and spam - reports spikes in user-reported phishing, including links to samples and the list of recipients that are affected.
• Mobile device management - provides information on devices that are exhibiting suspicious behavior or have been compromised (available on G Suite Business and G Suite Enterprise editions)

Beta program for the alert center now open

We’re excited to open a beta program to let G Suite customers try and provide feedback on the alert center functionality. The beta is available to all G Suite customers. G Suite super admins may apply with their primary domain on behalf of their organizations. Apply to join the beta here.

Making it easier to set up Android devices as company-owned

What’s new: When employees set up their phones and tablets as company-owned devices, they give your organization full control over those devices—allowing you to apply policies regarding app installation, network settings, security options, and more. This helps protect your users and your corporate data.

If you have advanced mobile device management but don’t register your company-owned devices in the Admin console, your users must choose to set up their devices as company-owned.

To encourage more users to make this choice, we’ll start showing the screen below to all users who add their G Suite account to a new Android device before adding their personal account.

This change will start rolling out on September 19th, 2018; please note that it may take several weeks for it to take effect for all users.

Starting on September 19th, users will be asked if they own the device they’re setting up. Unless they explicitly state that they own the device personally, ownership will be auto-assigned to your organization.

Currently, your users only see this choice if your organization has Device Owner mode enabled. That option will disappear from the Admin console on September 19th.

Note that users will only see the screen and option above on new (and recently factory-reset) devices running Android 6.0 or higher.

Allowing users to install any app from the managed Google Play store

In addition to the change outlined above, we’re making it easier to install apps on company-owned Android devices and work profiles.

Currently, you have to actively whitelist apps to make them available to your users. As of September 19th, users with company-owned Android devices and work profiles are allowed to install any app from the managed Google Play store by default. If you don’t want your users to do this, you can choose to restrict app availability to whitelisted apps.

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