Category: G Suite

The new Google Tasks app & service will become a core service of G Suite later this month.  Tasks, as you may recall, is a replacement for setting up tasks in Google Calendar and has a stand alone app for both Android and iOS.  Google has announced that starting June 28th that Tasks will be an on-by-default service in G Suite.

The change makes sense in that Google is trying to get everyone to move over to Tasks instead of using the task settings in Google Calendar, despite the fact that Google Tasks is still limited when you compare it to the old reminders feature in Calendar.  Tasks, for example, won’t let you setup recurring tasks while you can do that in reminders in Calendar.

Google has notified G Suite domain admins of when the new Gmail experience will begin rolling out when it goes to General Availability (GA) next month.  Currently, for G Suite, the new Gmail experience is in the Early Adopters Program and organizations can chose to participate in the program – or not.  This is the same for consumer too, but that will be changing when the experience goes GA in July.

Once the new experience goes GA, admins will have the option to switch everyone over immediately, allow users to switch themselves, or have users wait four weeks before they are opted into the new experience.  The latter of these will be the default behavior.

Google has announced via the G Suite blog that all G Suite domains have begun being migrated from classic Hangouts to the new Hangouts Meet for new calendar events.  The migration began a couple of days ago and is expect to take most of June to complete.  The change is slated for all G Suite domains.

Once a domain is migrated, any new calendar events created where a Hangouts meeting is scheduled as part of it, the link to the meeting will be a new Hangouts Meet invite.  The good news is that any existing calendar invites with older classic Hangouts information will still work.  For now at least.

A new set of content security features have begun to roll out to a wide range of G Suite domains today, allowing for greater control of what content within Google Team Drive are shared with others both inside and outside their domain.  The features, which were previewed back in March, are now rolling out to G Suite Business, Enterprise, Education, and Nonprofit domains today for Admins while users will get controls starting on June 4th.

The features are aimed at keeping confidential and sensitive intercompany data from being leaked or accidentally shared with those who should not have access to it.  Now admins can set domain level restrictions on what can be shared while individual Google Team Drive owners can select specifics for specific files – but the domain controls will override everything.

For those that don’t recall, Google Team Drive is the G Suite equivalent (with a lot more features) of the consumer oriented Google Drive.

G Suite is getting a small but time saving feature for admins who have corporate owned Android devices, or devices with a corporate work profile.  They will now be able to allow any app to be installed on those devices, saving the tedious work of having to whitelist apps one at a time.  It is a change that will be rolling out to all domains over the course of the new few weeks.

To this point, if a corporate owned or corporate work profile device needed to install an app beyond what the admin’s had whitelisted, they had to go and approve that app for that specific device.  As you can imagine, this can be time consuming if you have a lot of corporate devices.  Now admins can allow any app to be installed but, and this is important, end users will still only see the whitelisted apps in the corporate version of the Google Play Store first.  It is only when they search for an app that they will be able to find it and install it.

Google is in the process of rolling out a revamped Admin tool for G Suite administrators that makes it much easier to manage users on their domain.  The new look, which will take up to 15 days to roll out to all domains, makes it easier to see what settings a user has enabled and what features are available to them should the admin grant the privileges.

To this point, finding a particular setting of a user in G Suite hasn’t been overly difficult but it involved multiple clicks and diving into different menus.  This new card style look brings current settings front-and-center and makes it easy to determine what settings or features are available to that particular users without all of the clicking about.