Category: Google G Suite

Google has announced that by the end of 2018, the basic mobile management feature on G Suite domains will be enabled by default.  The announcement comes as part of a series of announcement the company has made regarding data and device security.

When the change is enabled, it will require that all users of Android and iOS phones associated with a G Suite domain to have, at a minimum, a password or PIN to unlock their phones.  Without it, users will not be able to access G Suite associated apps and thus, the data associated with those apps.

Over the past few months, Google has been making minor tweaks to the menus in various G Suite apps online.  Most of these efforts, with the biggest change coming last month, have been aimed at making it easier to navigate these menus and to be clear about what exactly you are doing with that menu option.

Today another round of menu tweaks started rolling out to all G Suite customers that further adjusts menus in Google Docs and Google Slides.  In their announcement, Google laid out the before and after menu views to help users find the difference.

For Google Docs, to add a line or page break, here are the changes:

• Before: Insert > Page break or Column break
• After: Insert > Break > Page break or Column break

Google has announced the dates when G Suite customers will begin getting the new Google Calendar.  To this point, G Suite admins have been able to manually force the update on domains or to delay the release of the new Material Design calendar on their domains.  Now that is changing with several key dates coming up.

For domains that are in the Rapid Release schedule, users will start getting update next Monday, January 8th if their domain is set to automatic updating.  Users can still opt out, for now.  For those domains in the Scheduled Release bracket, you will get the update following Monday, January 15th.  Again, users can opt out for now.

Google has announced that they will be making some minor menu updates to some of the G Suite apps starting in January.  The updates are primarily focused on Google Docs and Google Slides with the idea being to make it easier for users to find certain menu settings.

The changes that Google outlined will be coming to the apps starting January 4, 2018 with the schedule release of the updates.  It should be noted that the changes that are coming are only for the online version of the apps.  Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Slides for Android and iOS are not impacted by this change.

As for the changes themselves, most of them are renaming of features and not necessarily moving them.  For example, in both Google Docs and Google Slides, “Lists” in the Format menu have been renamed to “Bullets and numbering”.

The Google G Suite team has announced that effective September 13th of this year, the web clipboard in the suite of apps will no longer be available.  The feature, according to the G Suite team, is rarely used as the ability to copy and paste across browser windows has improved over the years.  The feature was originally designed for when this was more challenging.

As these issues have become less prevalent across many browsers, we’re looking to simplify the user experience by removing the web clipboard, which is rarely used, on September 13th, 2017.

The post goes on to way that the team is working continue to improve the copy and paste feature within the web-based versions of the apps.

Google has sent notifications out to G Suite customers that in starting next week, a warning will show up in Google Hangouts that SMS will no longer be supported.  That support will end on May 22nd.  The notification and change is part of the overall strategy of Google to move their G Suite customers to the new Google Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat while leveraging Android Messages for SMS on Android devices.  For consumers, the focus is on Google Allo and Duo to meet these communications needs.

For those readers who are on Project Fi (I am one of them) or using Google Voice, this change does not impact you.  This change only impacts G Suite customers who are using carrier numbers to send and receive SMS messages.  This fits along with what Google told me earlier this month at the Google Next Cloud event in San Francisco.