Last year, we introduced a new resource for admins: What’s new in G Suite? Don’t forget to visit the page regularly for a list of the most recent launches across G Suite.

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Earlier this year, we announced a new feature in Google Calendar that, using Google AI, can automatically suggest rooms for your meetings based on the locations of the guests. We’re now releasing this feature along with new and easier ways to update the main work locations for users in your domain.

Assign main work locations
As an admin, you can add main work location information for all users. Main work locations are the office / building location where the user spends most of their time or has their main desk or team. For users without a primary office building, the work location can be set to “Working remotely.”

If you know the work locations of all your users, you can update this information via GCDS or the Directory API.

If you don’t have users’ locations, you can instead let employees set their own location. Simply go to the Admin console and click Apps > G Suite > Settings for Directory > Profile editing and select "Work location."


With this setting enabled:

• Calendar will try to infer users’ locations. Based on previous room booking activity, Calendar can infer the user’s building and floor and set it automatically. It can also detect changes in room booking behavior and infer when the work location has changed (i.e. the office has moved) and suggest that the user update their location.
• Your users can update their main work locations themselves. Users can set and update their own location in Calendar settings.

Please note, you must have already entered building and floor information for your domain to input users’ main work locations.

Automatic room suggestions
Automatic room suggestions can help meeting organizers book courtesy rooms for all guests in any location, removing friction and creating peace of mind when planning meetings. Once user locations have been added, these users will instantly start seeing the room suggestions.

This launch includes a new, enhanced room and resource booking tab that will intelligently suggest the best available room for each attendee. This suggestion is based on the individual attendee’s building and floor location, previous booking history, audio/video equipment needs, and room capacity requirements.

In this tab, users will see the criteria that was considered when suggesting a room. They can adapt this criteria to fit their needs.



To unlock this feature, admins need to add detailed meeting room information into Calendar and users must have a work location set.

For more information on automatic room suggestions, check out the Help Center.

Launch Details
Release track:
Launching to both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release

Editions:
Available to all G Suite editions

Rollout pace:
Full rollout (1–3 days for feature visibility)

Impact:
Admins and all end users

Action:
Admin action suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center: Set up automatic room suggestion
Help Center: Set up meeting rooms and calendar resources
Help Center: Impact of adopting structured Calendar resources
Detailed Guide: Structuring Google Calendar Resources
The Keyword: New ways to help teams work faster and smarter with G Suite
G Suite Updates: Coming soon: automatic room suggestions in Google Calendar

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The devices audit log in the Admin console provides a report on the activities of managed mobile and desktop devices in your organization. Previously, this report was limited to domains with advanced mobile management enabled. To make it even more useful, we’re now showing some of the events in this report to G Suite Business, Enterprise, and Enterprise for Education customers with basic mobile management and endpoint verification enabled as well.

These customers can now use this report to:

• Find out when a G Suite account has been added to a device.
• Learn when device screen locks have been enabled and disabled. 

In addition, the devices audit log will now contain admin activities, like when an account wipe has been requested or executed. Knowledge of these activities can help you keep your users’ devices, and the data contained on them, safe. You can find this report in the Admin console at Reports > Audit > Devices.


At launch, for basic mobile management and endpoint verification customers, this report will only show events on managed Android and endpoint verification devices. We’re working on expanding coverage to more devices in the future.

Visit the Help Center to learn more about the devices audit log and how to access it. If you haven’t done so yet, check out this article for information on how to set up mobile management in your domain.

Launch Details
Release track:
Launching to both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release

Editions:
Available to G Suite Business, Enterprise, and Enterprise for Education editions, as well as Cloud Identity Premium

Rollout pace:
Full rollout (1–3 days for feature visibility)

Impact:
Admins only

Action:
Admin action suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center: Manage your organization's mobile devices
Help Center: Devices audit log


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Archive and translated versions (coming soon for June issue)

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We’re always looking for new ways to keep your users’ accounts secure and your organization’s data safe. As part of that effort, users may now be asked to verify their identity by providing their employee ID when they sign in to their G Suite account. This will better protect your users from hijacking attempts, as employee IDs are more difficult to guess and phish than many types of identity challenges.


Activate the employee ID login challenge
The employee ID login challenge can only be deployed in domains where a G Suite admin has provided that ID information for their users. You can do this in one of three ways:

1. Upload employee IDs directly into the Admin console.
2. Use Google Cloud Directory Sync to pull employee IDs from Microsoft Active Directory or an LDAP server.
3. Use the G Suite Admin SDK Directory API to populate the “externalIds[].type” “organization” field with employee IDs.

Once you’ve added this employee ID information, you can turn on the login challenge from the Admin console (Security > Login challenges > Use employee ID to keep my users more secure). Note that the employee ID login challenge is OFF by default.

Check out the Help Center for more information on how to add an employee ID as a login challenge.

Notify your users
If you choose to activate this login challenge, we recommend letting your users know where they can find their employee ID and that they may be asked for it when they sign in to their G Suite account. If they’d prefer to verify their identity another way, they should update their phone number and recovery email address.

Please note that this login challenge will not be presented to any user with two-step verification enabled.

Launch Details
Release track:
Launching to both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release

Editions:
Available to all G Suite editions

Rollout pace:
Full rollout (1–3 days for feature visibility)

Impact:
Admins and end users

Action:
Admin action suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center: Verify a user’s identity with a login challenge
Help Center: Add employee ID as a login challenge


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