Google Workspace Changes

Auto-provisioning support added for Kudos, 15Five, Rollbar, and Honey.

Google is expanding its auto-provisioning capabilities by adding support for four new third-party applications: Kudos, 15Five, Rollbar, and Honey. This feature allows G Suite admins to automatically synchronize user creation, modification, and deletion across these SaaS applications, reducing manual management overhead. G Suite Education, Business, and Enterprise customers can enable auto-provisioning for all supported applications, while Basic, Government, and Nonprofit customers can configure it for up to three applications.

Google Drive is improving the 'Shared with Me' section by intelligently organizing files by the people who shared them using AI.

Google Drive is updating the 'Shared with Me' section to help users find shared content more efficiently. The new interface uses artificial intelligence to predict the people and files a user is most likely to search for, organizing the section to make these predictions more visible. This update aims to streamline the process of finding files shared by specific collaborators.

Google Vault now supports Hangouts Chat for retention, legal holds, and eDiscovery.

Google Vault has introduced support for Hangouts Chat, providing G Suite admins with essential governance controls. Admins can now set default and custom retention policies for direct messages and room conversations, place legal holds to preserve data regardless of user deletion, and search, preview, and export chat content to meet legal and compliance obligations.

Quick Access for Google Docs is now available.

Quick Access for Google Docs uses artificial intelligence to suggest relevant files based on signals like Drive activity and information within documents, helping users work with the most up-to-date information and create new material quickly. This feature is available to G Suite Business and Enterprise editions with Google Cloud Search enabled.

Hangouts Chat is now generally available as a core service.

Google has launched Hangouts Chat as a core service for G Suite, making it available to all editions except Government. The service is enabled by default for most organizations and is compatible with classic Hangouts, ensuring seamless communication across both platforms. Admin controls for chat history and service activation are available in the Admin console.

Automatic room suggestions in Google Calendar

Google Calendar is introducing automatic room suggestions to help organizations collaborate more effectively. The tool suggests rooms optimized for attendees based on their building and floor location, previous booking history, audio/video equipment needs, and room capacity requirements. To unlock this feature, administrators must input detailed meeting room information into Calendar.

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

We’re now adding SAML integration for 12 additional applications: 15Five, 4Me, Clarizen, Deskpro, Heroku, Hightail, moxtra, ScreenSteps, Targetprocess, Tinfoil, UserEcho, xMatters

Admins can now limit the bandwidth used by Drive File Stream.

Administrators now have the ability to limit the bandwidth of Drive File Stream for both uploads and downloads to manage network usage within their organization.

Admins can now customize the content cache location for Drive File Stream.

Administrators can now customize the content cache location for Drive File Stream to any directory on a connected APFS, HFS+, or NTFS file system.

End users can now pause Drive File Stream syncing.

End users now have the ability to pause Drive File Stream syncing. While paused, the application will not upload local changes to Google Drive, and new versions of files made available offline will not be downloaded.

Improvements to menus in the web versions of Google Docs editors.

Google is updating the menus in the web versions of Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets to make items easier to find. Changes across all editors include renaming 'Spelling' to 'Check Spelling' in the Tools menu and removing 'Select none' from the Edit menu. Specifically for Google Sheets, 'Filter' is renamed to 'Create a filter' and 'Validation' to 'Data validation' in the Data menu, with various reordering of items in the File, Edit, Tools, Data, and Format menus.

Ability to email all members of a Team Drive.

Google is introducing a feature that allows users to email all members of a Team Drive to improve collaboration. Users can send emails either from the Team Drive's drop-down menu by selecting 'Email members' or from within a file in the Team Drive via the File menu's 'Email Collaborators' option. The tool allows users to customize the recipient list by filtering for members, guests, and specific access levels such as Full, Edit, Comment, and View.

G Suite admins can now manage Android app runtime permissions.

G Suite admins using Google Mobile Management can now control runtime permissions for Android apps on work profiles or company-owned devices. Admins can set a global policy to automatically allow, deny, or prompt users for permissions, and can also configure specific runtime permissions for individual whitelisted apps, which takes priority over the global setting.

Updated 'Can view' permissions for Microsoft Office files to allow viewing of comments.

Google Drive is updating the 'Can view' permission setting for Microsoft Office files. Users with 'Can view' access will now be able to see any comments added to MS Office files after the launch of this change, although they will remain unable to create new comments or reply to existing ones.

Comment on Microsoft Office files, PDFs, and images in Google Drive preview mode.

Google Drive now allows users to comment directly on Microsoft Office files (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), PDFs, and images within the preview pane without needing to convert them into Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides. This update introduces anchored comments—such as drawing rectangles on PDFs/images or selecting specific text and cells—and supports the importing and exporting of comments to and from the underlying OOXML and PDF files.