Tag: G Suite

A new feature to Google Drive is currently in the process of rolling out to all G Suite versions that will allow for commenting – and to be able to see those comments – on Microsoft Office files, PDFs and image files.  The new feature means that users of G Suite will be able to collaborate with colleagues or others outside of their organization who use Microsoft Office.  More importantly, this can be done without having to convert the files.

The new feature appears in Google Drive online and when you open up the preview pane on a Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint file, you will be able to see the comments on that file and be able to add comments.  They will be saved and will stay attached to the file.  This should significantly lower the friction on collaborating on projects within organizations and with customers of an organization.

File this under the “better late than never” category.  Over a year after releasing the ability to manage iOS devices, even those without a Mobile Device Management (MDM) profile, Google has added the same functionality for Android devices in G Suite.  The feature means that admins can set basic security requirements on Android devices without requiring the BOYD owner to install a MDM profile on their phone.

When Basic Mobile Management is enabled, admins can:

• Enforce a device screen lock. (Lollipop or later)
• Wipe a corporate account (but not the entire device).
• View, search, and manage their device inventory.

It is unclear why it took Google so long to add this functionality for Android devices but likely has to do with the shear number of devices that are out on the market with various configurations.

Google has announced an improvement the Google Mobile Management feature in G Suite today. The improvement allows administrators to publish a private app to up to 20 different organizations in their domain.  This gives admins more flexibility to deploy a private app to a particular region or a test group as an example.

For those not familiar with it, Google Mobile Management is part of the G Suite business offering that allows companies to have a private Google Play Store that regulates which apps can be downloaded to corporate phones.  This also allows for private apps, those not published in the public Play Store, to be available to employees.  To this point, the publishing of apps in this private store was across the entire domain.  Now admins can be more selective.

Google is in the process of rolling out a new Gmail attachment compliance policy to all G Suite customers.  The new settings, which are optional, allow for G Suite administrators to configure scanning of the content of an attachment to prevent corporate data loss.

Previously, G Suite admins could configure attachment scanning but it would only scan the header of the attachment of configured file types (like .docx, .pdf, etc).  The problem is that users could change the file extension to bypass the scanning and thus get the corporate data out of the corporate network.

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

Hangouts Meet, the Google G Suite enterprise video conference solution, has added nine new countries to the dial-in support list.  With dial-in support, Hangouts Meet will generate a phone number for members to dial in to the meeting if they are not able to join via video.  The new countries are:

• Austria
• Belgium
• Czech Republic
• Finland
• Ireland
• Norway
• Romania
• Switzerland
• Turkey

With these additions, there are now 24 countries were dial-in is supported.  International dial-in support came to the conferencing solution back in October 2017 with it mostly being in Western European countries initially.