Google Workspace Updates

Improvements to PDFs imported to Google Docs

Monday, November 30, 2020

Quick launch summary We’re making a range of updates that will make PDFs converted into Google Docs better. Specifically, you may notice improvements in:

Image imports, including the image itself and text wrapping related to images.
Text styles and formatting, such as importing underline and strikethrough, background color, and more fonts.
Layout conversion, including support for multi-column layouts, custom page sizes, tables with borders, and improved content ordering.

Importing PDFs into Google Docs now supports more formatting options.
Getting started

Admins: There is no admin control for this feature.
End users: This feature will be ON by default. Visit the Help Center to learn more about converting PDF and photo files to text.

Rollout pace

Rapid and Scheduled Release domains: Full rollout (1–3 days for feature visibility) starting on November 30, 2020

Availability

Available to Google Workspace Essentials, Business Starter, Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Essentials, Enterprise Standard, and Enterprise Plus, as well as G Suite Basic, Business, Education, Enterprise for Education, and Nonprofits customers

Resources

Google Help: Convert PDF and photo files to text

Changes to Google Chat group conversations and classic Hangouts coming December 3, 2020

Monday, November 30, 2020

What’s changingStarting December 3, 2020, we’ll make three changes to how group conversations work in Google Chat:

Add and change members. You’ll be able to add and change members of new group conversations.
Different Google Vault retention policy. If you have a Vault retention policy set, the updated group conversations will respect a different retention policy.
Compatibility with classic Hangouts. Group conversations in Hangouts will begin to appear in Google Chat over the coming weeks.

See below for more information on each of these updates.
Who’s impactedAdmins and end users
Why you’d use itAs we announced earlier this year, starting in the first half of 2021, everyone can begin upgrading from Hangouts to Chat. To ensure a smooth transition, we will help automatically migrate your Hangouts conversations and saved history. These changes further ensure compatibility between classic Hangouts and Chat to make migrating your users as seamless as possible.
Additional detailsUpdated group conversationsWhen a new member is added to a group conversation, all members will see a message announcing the new member. The new member will be able to see the entire conversation, even messages sent before they entered, allowing them to catch up easily.

If you have a group conversation created before December 3, you can easily create an updated conversation with the same people using the “Start a new chat” option in the conversation settings menu.

History and retention settingsWhile end users can toggle history on and off at the conversation level, admins can control whether to keep chat history for users in their organization. They can set the default and also let users change their history setting for each conversation.
Note that these updated group conversations will also respect a different retention policy in Vault. If you set custom Chat retention rules in Google Vault, the scope of coverage will change. Rules set for “All Chat Spaces” (previously known as “All Rooms”) will apply to existing chat rooms, plus updated group messages and group messages that synchronize between Chat and Hangouts. Visit the Help Center for more details.
Compatibility with classic HangoutsGroup conversations in Hangouts—beginning with conversations, followed by message history—will begin to appear in Google Chat over the coming weeks. This will allow your users to move from Hangouts to Chat without losing context. In addition, 1:1 messages, updated group conversations, and unthreaded rooms from Chat will begin to appear in Hangouts (Note: this change will only be available for users with Hangouts enabled).Getting started

Admins: We recommend you review your existing retention rules and evaluate if you need to change them to retain only the message data you want. You can also visit the Help Center to learn more about turning history in Chat on or off for your organization.
End users: Membership in these updated group conversations will be editable by default starting December 3, 2020.

Rollout paceUpdated group conversations

Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains: Gradual (up to 15 days for feature visibility) starting on December 3, 2020

Compatibility with classic Hangouts

Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains: Extended rollout (potentially longer than 15 days for feature visibility) starting on December 3, 2020

Availability

Available to Google Workspace Business Starter, Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Standard, and Enterprise Plus, as well as G Suite Basic, Business, Education, Enterprise for Education, and Nonprofits customers
Not available to Google Workspace Essentials and Enterprise Essentials customers

Resources

Google Workspace Admin Help: Turn chat history on or off for users
Google Workspace Admin Help: Action required: Upcoming changes to how Vault handles group chats
Google Workspace Admin Help: Choose a chat service for your organization
Google Help: Retain messages in Google Chat and classic Hangouts with Vault
The Keyword: The latest on Google Hangouts and the upgrade to Google Chat

Improving Google Meet attendance reports and making them available to more customers

Tuesday, November 24, 2020

Quick launch summary We previously launched Google Meet attendance reports for education meetings. We’re now making several enhancements to provide more access, control, and visibility into meetings and live stream reports. Specifically, we’re adding:

Live streaming viewership data. Attendance reports will now include data on live streaming viewers in a separate tab. Live stream data will include total viewer count and viewers over the course of the live stream.
Admin control over attendance tracking. Admins can choose whether an organizational unit can use the attendance tracking feature or not.
New settings to control report creation. Meeting organizers who are not in Education domains can choose whether a report is created for the meeting via in-meeting settings or from the Calendar event before the meeting starts. Meeting organizers at Education domains will continue to automatically receive attendance reports for meetings with five or more participants.
In-call viewer count for live stream events. Live stream hosts and meeting attendees (not live stream viewers) will now see a count of the total number of live stream participants when joining via Meet from a desktop or computer.
Attendance reports for more customers. We are making attendance reports available to Google Workspace Essentials, Business Plus, Enterprise Essentials, Enterprise Standard, and Enterprise Plus customers. Previously, they were only available to Enterprise for Education customers.

Getting started

Admins:

Attendance and live stream reports will be available by default for your users, but you can make them unavailable to your domain or specific OUs and groups. Visit the Help Center to learn more about managing attendance reports for your organization.
In-call viewer count for live streams will be ON by default and can’t be turned off. Visit our Help Center to learn more about live streaming a video meeting.

End users:

Users in Enterprise for Education domains: Meeting organizers will continue to receive reports automatically for meetings with five or more participants.
Users in other domains: Attendance reports will be OFF by default, but meeting organizers can turn them ON for any meeting using the meeting settings during the call or the calendar event before the call. Visit the Help Center to learn more about how to turn attendance reports on or off in Google Meet.
All users: In-call viewer count for live streams will be ON by default and can’t be turned off. Visit our Help Center to learn more about live streaming a video meeting.

Example of a live stream attendance report

Live stream viewer count is shown in the top left corner of the screen
Rollout pace Live streaming data in reports:

Rapid and Scheduled Release domains: Full rollout (1–3 days for feature visibility) starting on November 24, 2020

Settings to control report creation (non-Education organizations only):

Rapid and Scheduled Release domains: Full rollout (1–3 days for feature visibility)

In-call viewer count for live streams:

Rapid and Scheduled Release domains: Full rollout (1–3 days for feature visibility) starting on November 24, 2020

Availability

Available to Google Workspace Essentials, Business Plus, Enterprise Essentials, Enterprise Standard and Enterprise Plus, as well as G Suite Enterprise for Education customers
Not available to Google Workspace Business Starter, Business Standard, as well as G Suite Basic, Business, Education, and Nonprofits customers

Resources

Roadmap

This feature was listed as an upcoming release.

Office editing on iOS brings Google Workspace collaboration to Microsoft Office files

Tuesday, November 24, 2020

Quick launch summary We’re making Office editing available on iOS. This feature brings the collaborative and assistive features of Google Workspace to your Microsoft Office files when you’re using your iOS device. Already available on the web and Android, it:

Allows you to edit, comment, and collaborate on Microsoft Office files using Google Docs’, Sheets’, and Slides’ powerful real-time collaboration tools.
Improves sharing options, improves sharing controls, and reduces the need to download and email file attachments.
Streamlines workflows by reducing the need to convert file types.

Office editing will replace Quickoffice (sometimes known as Office Compatibility Mode), which has more limited functionality and collaboration capabilities. See more about Office editing in our announcement for the feature on the web.
Getting started

Rollout pace

This feature is available now for all users.

Availability

Available to Google Workspace Essentials, Business Starter, Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Essentials, Enterprise Standard, and Enterprise Plus as well as G Suite Basic, Business, Education, Enterprise for Education, and Nonprofits customers
Available to users with personal Google Accounts

Resources

Make specific applications exempt from session length policy

Monday, November 23, 2020

What’s changing Last year, we launched an open beta that enabled Cloud Identity admins to configure a session length (a.k.a. “reauth”) for Google Console and Cloud SDK. Now, we’re enhancing session length controls by allowing you to exempt specific applications from the reauth policy. We hope this will make it easier to roll out this feature in your domain.

Who’s impacted Admins

Why you’d use it The Google Cloud session control feature applies a session length to Google’s own GCP admin tools, as well as customer-owned and third-party applications that use the cloud-platform scope. When the configured session length expires, the application will require the user to reauthenticate to continue operating, analogous to what would happen if an admin revoked the refresh tokens for that application. The reauthentication requirement can help reduce unauthorized access to sensitive data.
We heard your feedback that there are some scenarios that make it difficult to roll this out. For example, some applications do not gracefully handle the reauth scenario, causing confusing application crashes or stack traces. Some other applications are deployed for server-to-server use cases with user credentials instead of the recommended service account credential, in which case there is no user to periodically reauthenticate. Customers impacted by these scenarios are unable to roll out session controls to any applications as it will cause these apps to work improperly.
This update allows you to add these apps to a trusted list, temporarily exempting the apps from session length constraints, while implementing session controls for all other GCP admin surfaces.

The previous session control settings page in the Admin console

The new session control settings page in the Admin console. Note the new “Exempt trusted apps” checkbox.
Getting started

Admins: This feature will be OFF by default and can be enabled manually using the “Exempt Trusted apps” setting. For more information on how to review the apps currently requiring cloud-platform scopes, and how to add those apps to the Trusted list, visit our Help Center.
End users: There is no end user setting for this feature.

Rollout pace

Rapid and Scheduled Release domains: Full rollout (1–3 days for feature visibility) starting on Monday, November 23, 2020

Availability

Available to Google Workspace Essentials, Business Starter, Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Essentials, Enterprise Standard, and Enterprise Plus, as well as G Suite Basic, Business, Education, Enterprise for Education, and Nonprofits, and Cloud Identity customers

Resources

View richer information about coworkers directly within the Gmail side panel

Monday, November 23, 2020

What’s changing You can now find additional information about people within your organization, your Contacts, and people who email you in the Gmail side panel. This includes:

Contact information, such as phone number and email address,
Team and manager,
Office and desk location,
Whether you’ve received email from them before, and more.

Additional information will appear in the Gmail side panel.

You can also add people to your contacts and send them an email or message.
Who’s impacted Admins and end users
Why you’d use it This feature expands upon information you can already view when hovering over a person’s name in Gmail. In the side panel, you can learn more about who the person you’re collaborating with is, what team they’re on, and whether you’ve interacted with them before. We hope this feature makes collaboration and connecting with key stakeholders easier.
Additional details To maximize this feature, it’s helpful to have user data fully populated across Google Workspace apps. Workspace admins can populate this data in a few locations:

The “Users” section of the Admin console
Google Cloud Directory Sync
Admin SDK

Getting started

Admins: There is no admin control for this feature. Visit the Help Center to learn more about adding information to a user’s Directory profile.
End users: There is no end user setting for this feature. Click “More info” while hovering over a user’s information card, or select the Contacts icon in the side panel. Visit the Help Center to learn more about using Google products side by side.

Rollout pace

Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains: Extended rollout (potentially longer than 15 days for feature visibility) starting on November 23, 2020

Availability

Available to Google Workspace Essentials, Business Starter, Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Essentials, Enterprise Standard, and Enterprise Plus, as well as G Suite Basic, Business, Education, Enterprise for Education, and Nonprofits
Available to users with personal Google Accounts

Resources

Bringing breakout rooms in Google Meet to more Google Workspace customers

Thursday, November 19, 2020

Quick launch summaryLast month, we launched breakout rooms in Google Meet to G Suite Enterprise for Education customers. We’re now making breakout rooms available to Google Workspace, Essentials, Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Essentials, Enterprise Standard, and Enterprise Plus customers, as well as G Suite Business and Enterprise for Education customers.
In addition, we’re introducing the following new features to improve your experience in breakout rooms:

Ask for help: Participants can ask for help when they are in a breakout room, and the moderator can see the request from the moderator panel and join the breakout room.
Timer/countdown: The moderator can set up a timer for a breakout session. Participants will see a banner to keep track of how much more time they have in the breakout room. They’ll also be alerted when there are 30 seconds left so that they can wrap up the discussion and, when time is up, participants will be prompted to go back to the main call.
Additional supported participants: Dial-in phone participants can now be assigned to breakout rooms. Starting in two weeks, anonymous users will also be able to be added to breakout rooms.

Getting started

Admins: There is no admin control for this feature.
End users: This feature will be available by default. Visit the Help Center to learn more about using breakout rooms in Meet.

Rollout pace

Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains: This feature is available now for all users.

Availability

Available to Workspace Essentials, Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Essentials, Enterprise Standard, and Enterprise Plus, as well as G Suite Business and Enterprise for Education customers
Not available to Workspace Business Starter, as well as G Suite Basic, Education, and Nonprofits customers

Resources

Roadmap

This feature was listed as an upcoming release.

Useful Links

Updates

Improvements to PDFs imported to Google Docs

Changes to Google Chat group conversations and classic Hangouts coming December 3, 2020

Improving Google Meet attendance reports and making them available to more customers

Office editing on iOS brings Google Workspace collaboration to Microsoft Office files

Make specific applications exempt from session length policy

View richer information about coworkers directly within the Gmail side panel

Bringing breakout rooms in Google Meet to more Google Workspace customers

Filter by product

Filter by date

Subscribe by email

Subscribe by feed

Localized Google Workspace Updates

Useful Links

Join the official community for Google Workspace administrators

Learn about more Google Workspace launches

View active Google Workspace Beta Programs