This official feed from the Google Workspace team provides essential information about new features and improvements for Google Workspace customers.
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What’s changing

We’re expanding the capabilities of Gemini’s Deep Research feature by integrating it with your Google Workspace apps. This update allows Deep Research to seamlessly gather information from your content in Gmail, Chat, and Drive - including Slides, Sheets and Docs files - in addition to the web, to create a more comprehensive and personalized report.

Previously, users had to manually upload individual files from Drive to supplement their Deep Research. Now, Deep Research can pull securely from your Workspace content, including emails and even chats, informing reports with relevant context.


This update helps end users, including students, educators and those in small businesses, to do their best work by making research more efficient and context-aware. Your users can now integrate information directly from:

  • Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, and PDFs in Drive, including non-Google files
  • Context from emails in Gmail
  • Information from Chat messages
Example use cases for end users:

  • Business planning: Users can ask Deep Research to kickstart analysis for a new product using team documents, build out a competitor report referencing internal strategy memos and communications, or help onboard onto a new project quickly after analyzing documents, emails, and chat history.
  • Project catch-up: Get quickly caught up on an in-progress project by asking, "Catch me up on my <some project you have docs, chats, emails about. e.g., my remodeling project>. What are some decisions I need to make, and for each, can you research potential options".
  • Academic research: Students and faculty can ask Deep Research to review their existing notes and research papers on a topic and combine that with web research to pull together an insightful report that includes insights from their own documents.

Getting started

Rollout pace

Availability

Available for Google Workspace:

  • Business Starter, Standard, Plus
  • Enterprise Starter, Standard, Plus
  • Education Fundamentals, Standard, and Plus
  • Frontline Starter and Standard
  • Essentials, Enterprise Essentials, and Enterprise Essentials Plus
  • Nonprofits
Available for Google Workspace customers with these add-ons:

  • Gemini Business*
  • Gemini Enterprise*
  • Google AI Pro for Education
*As of January 15, 2025, we’re no longer offering the Gemini Business and Gemini Enterprise add-ons for sale. Please refer to this announcement for more details. 

Resources

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What’s changing

We’re excited to announce that inline threading is rolling out for direct messages (DMs) and group direct messages (gDMs) in Google Chat. This has been a highly requested feature, and we're pleased to deliver it as part of our effort to simplify the Chat experience and address top user feedback about conversation consistency.

Until now, inline threading was only available in spaces. With this update, you can now reply in-thread to any message in a direct conversation, just as you do in a space. This helps to keep conversations organized, allowing you and your colleagues to follow specific topics and avoid cluttering the main chat stream.

Getting started

  • Admins: There is no admin control for this feature.
  • End users: There is no end user setting for this feature. This feature will be ON by default as it rolls out.

Rollout pace

Availability

Available to all Google Workspace customers, Workspace Individual Subscribers, and users with personal Google accounts

Resources

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What’s changing

We previously introduced the option to set expirations on files that reside in shared drives using the Google Drive API. Today, we are bringing the ability to set expiring access for files and folders in shared drives directly from the sharing dialog. This highly-requested feature brings the ease and security of My Drive access controls into your collaborative shared drives.

File expirations

You can now set expirations when sharing files in a shared drive. This lets you add an expiration date right in the sharing dialog for temporary collaborators, ensuring access is automatically revoked and eliminating the need for manual cleanup.
Add expiration while sharing files in shared drives.

Add expiration while sharing files in shared drives.

Folder expirations

For shared drive folders, you can now apply an expiration date specifically to the Viewer role. This setting is easily accessible in the folder's sharing dialog, helping you automatically remove read-only access when a collaborator's temporary need is finished.
Add expiration for Viewer role while sharing folders in shared drives.

Consistent expiration behavior in My Drive

We're standardizing access expiration for files and folders in My Drive. The experience is now consistent with shared drives, making it more predictable for you to know when access will expire.

Old behavior: If you granted someone temporary Editor access to a file inside a parent folder they could only view, they would lose all access to the file once their Editor permission expired.

New behavior: When their temporary Editor access expires, their permission will revert to the access they have on the parent folder (in this case, Viewer). They will not lose access to the file completely.

Editor access expires, and reverts to Viewer access (user has Viewer access on the parent folder).
Editor access expires, and reverts to Viewer access (user has Viewer access on the parent folder).

Getting started

You can only set sharing expirations on Web and Android phones. Expirations cannot be set on iOS devices in My Drive or shared drives.

Rollout pace

Availability

Available to Google Workspace:

  • Business Starter, Standard, Plus
  • Enterprise Starter, Standard, Plus
  • Enterprise Essentials, Enterprise Essentials Plus
  • Education Standard, Plus
  • Nonprofits
  • Frontline Starter, Standard, Plus
Also available to:
  • Google One AI Premium 
  • Google AI Pro and Ultra
  • Gemini Business, Enterprise*
*As of January 15, 2025, we’re no longer offering the Gemini Business and Gemini Enterprise add-ons for sale. Please refer to this announcement for more details. 

Resources


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What’s changing

We are introducing a redesigned Google Chat conversation header on the web. The new header offers a simpler, more consistent layout that makes key tools easier to find and use. It includes a side panel where users can access shared content and manage tasks without leaving the conversation view. The panel’s width can be adjusted or expanded to a full-screen view as needed.

Specifically, the new header has icons which can be used to: 

  • Select “Shared” to access shared files, links and media. 
  • Select “Tasks” to create and manage space tasks.
  • Select “Threads” to see and respond to active threads. 
  • Select “Board” to see pinned messages, files and shared links.  
Navigating between Shared, Tasks, Threads, and Board by clicking on header icons


Navigating between Shared, Tasks, Threads, and Board by clicking on header icons


Side panels can expand into fullscreen with the drag bar
Side panels can expand into fullscreen with the drag bar

Getting started

  • Admins: This feature will be on by default. There is no admin control for this feature.
  • End users: This feature will be on by default for users on the web. To use it, look for the icons in the top right of your Chat window. Use our Help Center to learn how to navigate Google Chat. 

Rollout pace

Availability

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

Resources

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What’s changing

We are expanding an existing Google Chat feature, previously only available for Education customers, to more Workspace customers.

This feature gives administrators the ability to limit who can create new conversations in Google Chat. When this setting is applied to users (through an organizational unit or a Google Group), those users will be prevented from initiating new conversations, or adding new members to existing conversations.

Users with this restriction can continue to converse in conversations they are already a member of. 

Why it’s important

Similar to how this feature is used for students, it allows organizations to enable Chat for a segment of employees such that they can receive important messages and contribute to existing conversations, while limiting their ability to create new, unmanaged conversations. This helps provide a safer and easier way for organizations to communicate. 

Getting started

  • Admins: This feature will be OFF by default. It can be enabled for specific users by placing them in an Organizational Unit (OU) or a Google Group and applying the setting in the Admin console.
  • End users: There is no end-user setting for this feature. If this policy is applied to your account by your administrator, you will not be able to start new conversations or create spaces, but you can still reply to conversations you are added to.

Rollout pace

Availability

  • Business Plus
  • Enterprise Standard and Plus
  • Business Continuity and Continuity Plus 
  • Frontline Plus and Frontline Standard 

Resources

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