Google Workspace Changes

Improvements for braille mode in Google Docs

Improved how suggestions are announced in braille mode in Google Docs. You’ll now hear detailed suggestion information inline with the rest of the text — this includes whether the suggestion is an insertion or deletion, and the author of the suggestion.

Hangouts to Google Chat upgrade beginning August 16th, with option to opt-out.

Beginning August 16, 2021, users who have the “Chat and classic Hangouts” setting selected will be upgraded to “Chat preferred,” unless you explicitly opt out. Classic Hangouts will no longer be supported beginning late 2021, and all remaining users will be migrated to Google Chat.

Backup and Sync users should begin transitioning to Drive for desktop

Now, we want to provide a more detailed timeline for this transition

A new experience for Google Contacts which will help Google Workspace users learn more about their colleagues.

Introducing a new experience for Google Contacts which will help Google Workspace users learn more about their colleagues. Within Contacts or the Contacts sidebar, you can view more detailed information about others, including their management chain, department, and title, A history of your Workspace relationship, including email conversations and meetings.

You can now enable audit logging for Google Cloud Search APIs for improved tracking of usage data.

With deeper tracking, it's now possible to build richer analytics on top of Cloud Search usage to make data driven decisions and improve your user’s search experience.

Enhanced content classification and DLP with Drive labels beta.

Drive labels enable admins to configure custom labels for a domain, and then enable users to apply these labels to files in Drive. Automated classification can help organizations automatically add Drive labels to content based on administrator-defined rules and predefined content detectors.

Workspace admins can monitor and analyze their organizations’ Keep activity with audit logs and a new API for Keep.

Workspace admins can monitor and analyze their organizations’ Keep activity, starting today, admins will see audit logs for user activity in Google Keep in the Admin console. The API will allow admins and admin-enabled apps to manage Keep access controls for an organization, enabling support for cases such as enterprise data protection.

Gmail exports in Vault now include a new CSV metadata file

Now when you create Gmail exports in Google Vault, you will get a new CSV-formatted file of the export metadata in addition to the XML file you currently receive.

Cloud Search now supports Optical Character Recognition (OCR) based text extraction for PDFs that contain images.

This makes PDFs with images containing text, such as scanned documents, easily searchable by users and improving discoverability of such PDFs.

Restrict Google Drive for desktop to company owned devices, now generally available

You can now restrict the use of Google Drive for desktop to company owned devices. This functionality was previously available in beta.

We’re adding the ability to boost Google Cloud Search results using the Cloud Search Query API for third party data sources.

By providing a wide range of contextual attributes, users will see more tailored results based on inputs such as location, department, and job role.

Apply context-aware access policies to mobile and desktop applications

Admins can now assign existing or new context-aware access levels to Google desktop and mobile applications.

Google Vault now supports Google Sites

You can use Google Vault to set retention policies for Google Sites, perform searches of Google Sites data, and export Google Sites content.

We’re introducing support for Virtual Private Cloud Service Controls (VPC-SC) for Google Cloud Search.

You can use these controls to define a service perimeter around Google Cloud Search resources and create policies to grant access based on contextual attributes.

Changes to Google Drive search operators may alter your Google Vault search results

We’ve updated Google Drive Search operators to enable better results when searching for files in Google Vault.