This official feed from the Google Workspace team provides essential information about new features and improvements for Google Workspace customers.
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On August 31, 2026, we’ll start rolling out the ability to start, stop, and manage the “Take notes for me” feature directly from the Google Meet Hardware touch controller for eligible meetings. This ensures in-room participants have direct control over Gemini note-taking without being in Companion mode.



Controlling “Take notes for me” from the Google Meet hardware touch controller


Historically, managing AI features during a meeting required a user to join from a laptop in Companion mode. This new update surfaces the necessary controls directly on the touchscreen hardware, making it easier for team collaboration. In particular, it offers the following:

Easy visibility & control

We are surfacing a dedicated badge on the touch controller screen, mirroring the web experience. Users can easily see if Gemini is taking notes and toggle its state between active and inactive.



Active and inactive states of “Take notes For me” on the Google Meet hardware touch controller


Off-the-record capability

Users can confidently pause note-taking during off-the-record discussions, then resume with the tap of a button.



Pause and continue taking notes when needed with “Take notes For me” on the Google Meet hardware touch controller


Note: This feature will be available on the touch controller only for meetings where “Take notes for me” is available.

Getting started

Rollout pace

Availability

  • Business: Business Standard and Plus
  • Enterprise: Enterprise Standard and Plus
  • Consumer: Google AI Plus, Pro, and Ultra
  • Other Editions: Frontline Plus
  • Education Add-Ons: Google AI Pro for Education

Note: The plans above include “Take notes for me,” but this feature only operates on Google Meet hardware, which requires a separate license. Some users on Google Meet hardware with licenses that do not include “Take notes for me” functionality may see this feature if they join a meeting that is “Take notes for me’“ capable.

Resources

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Google Sheets now supports grouped field persistence for pivot tables. When you create custom groupings or work with grouped date, time, or numeric fields, these fields are now retained directly in the pivot table editor sidebar as reusable source fields. This allows you to unassign grouped fields from your active table layout without losing their underlying configuration, making it easy to re-add or modify them at any time. 

Additionally, this update improves interoperability with Microsoft Excel (.xlsx) files. Previously, when importing Microsoft Excel files containing pivot tables with grouped fields into Google Sheets, those custom groupings were dropped from the field list, requiring manual recreation. With this update, grouped field configurations are accurately preserved when importing/exporting spreadsheet files.



Grouped fields retained as reusable source fields in the Google Sheets pivot table editor sidebar

Getting started

Rollout pace

Availability

  • Available to all Google Workspace customers and users with personal Google accounts

Resources

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For enterprise organizations, migrating files along with their permissions to a new platform can feel daunting and risk interrupting daily business operations. To help simplify this transition, we are excited to announce general availability of Google Workspace data import (advanced mode) to support large-scale file migrations from Microsoft OneDrive. Just like the other features of the data import, this is available at no additional cost.

This update allows IT teams to execute large migrations efficiently, as you can import multiple concurrent batches at a time. Data import automatically adjusts import speeds to match your Microsoft licensing tier, maximizing throughput without exceeding source quotas.

Data import provides:

  • Ease of use: A turnkey, scalable cloud-native service that can be accessed and used directly from the admin console. 
  • Quicker speeds and accuracy: Finish importing data sooner with faster migration speeds from parallelization and improved algorithms.
  • No additional cost to use: No additional infrastructure costs during migration or licensing costs for third-party data migration tools.


Additionally, customers will be able to use the migration planning utility for file migrations that will help improve their change management and data migration forecasting. The migration planning utility is available to provide source data corpus details and migration timeline estimates. This offers customers no-friction discovery and data-driven planning when undertaking large scale enterprise migrations from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace.


Getting started

Rollout pace

Availability

  • Business: Business Starter, Standard, and Plus
  • Enterprise: Enterprise Standard and Plus
  • Education: Education Fundamentals, Standard, and Plus
  • Other Editions: Frontline Starter, Standard, and Plus; Essentials Starter, Enterprise Essentials, and Enterprise Essentials Plus; Nonprofit

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For enterprise organizations, migrating communication history and collaboration channels to a new platform can feel daunting and risk interrupting daily business operations. To make this transition smoother, we are excited to announce that migrating chat data from Microsoft Teams to Google Workspace for large scale workloads is now generally available in data import. Just like the other features of the Data Import tool, this is available at  zero tool cost.

This enhancement builds on our existing data import capabilities, allowing admins to easily copy channel messages, group chats, and direct conversations from Teams to Workspace at no additional tool or infrastructure costs.

Data import for Teams offers:

  • Ease of use: A turnkey, scalable cloud-native solution that can be accessed and used directly from the admin console.
  • Quicker speeds and accuracy: Finish importing data sooner with faster migration speeds from parallelization and improved algorithms.
  • No additional cost to use: No additional infrastructure costs during migration or licensing costs for third-party data migration tools.
  • High fidelity: Both Teams channels as well as private chat messages (i.e. 1:1 and group messages) are imported.


Additionally, the migration planning utility now supports Teams to help customers improve their change management and data migration forecasting. The migration planning utility is available to provide migration timeline estimates and organize user data into speed-optimized batches. This offers customers simplified discovery and data-driven planning when undertaking large scale enterprise migrations from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace.


Getting started

Rollout pace

Availability

  • Business: Business Starter, Standard, and Plus
  • Enterprise: Enterprise Standard and Plus
  • Education: Education Fundamentals, Standard, and Plus
  • Other Editions: Frontline Starter, Standard, and Plus; Essentials Starter, Enterprise Essentials, and Enterprise Essentials Plus; Nonprofit

Resources

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Space owners and managers can now control who can view the full list of members in a Google Chat space, providing enhanced privacy and administrative control for sensitive, large-scale, or external collaboration spaces.

Previously, any member of a Google Chat space could view the complete list of participants. We are introducing a new space setting—View members—that allows space owners and managers to restrict member visibility within one of four permission levels:

  • Owners only
  • Owners & managers
  • All members (default)
  • Entire organization

Similar to membership privacy controls in Google Groups, there are scenarios where limiting member list visibility enhances organization security or privacy:

  • Customer spaces: Collaborating with multiple external clients, vendors, or partners
  • Sensitive forums: Allowing users to join communities on sensitive topics without revealing their membership in that community
  • Confidential projects: Prevent participants in broad project spaces from seeing every internal or external user who has been added to the initiative

Please note that regardless of the member visibility restriction, users will always be able to see the name and profile of anyone who actively sends a message in the space.

Getting started

  • Admins: There is no admin control for this feature.
  • End users: Navigate to Space Settings > Membership > View Members permission control, and select the desired visibility level.

Rollout pace

Availability

  • Available to all Google Workspace customers

Resources

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