Author Archives: Gmail Blog

The cloud demystified: How it works and why it matters

Whether you’re backing up photos or streaming our favorite TV shows, you may know it’s all made possible by the cloud. But for a lot of us, that’s where the understanding ends. With Next ’19, Google Cloud’s annual customer conference, this week, it’s a good time to ask: What is this cloud, anyway?

Before cloud, businesses maintained fleets of computers (known as “servers” in tech speak) to create websites and apps, and to equip employees with the software needed to build them. Those computers stayed in a server room or a nearby data center, connected by an internal network and to the broader internet. A company’s IT team had to monitor all those computers, network cables and other equipment—and keep it all working for employees, under budget. So that meant that every few years, the IT team bought new computers and took care of any maintenance and upgrades, like adding a new networking line or new software.

Cut to today: we have faster computing speeds and better internet connectivity, and these have made it easier for computers around the world to connect quickly. It’s no longer necessary for businesses to own servers and data centers. Since Google already has a massive global network—made up of things like our own data centers and undersea cables—we can provide that infrastructure to businesses so they can build products and services. In a nutshell, that’s what Google Cloud is—access to Google’s global infrastructure and all the state-of-the-art tools we’ve created over time to serve Google’s billions of users.

This new way of building in the cloud has resulted in changes to the way that companies use computers and other technology.

Why is the cloud such a big deal?

The cloud took the tech world by storm, and it keeps growing for consumer and business uses. Companies want to use the newest, fastest technology, which isn’t possible when you’re only buying new computers every few years.

Public cloud providers allow companies to use the newest technology without having to buy and maintain it themselves. Google Cloud, for example, maintains complicated networks that can quickly move data around the world. Keeping information secure, a challenge for businesses, is also easier with the cloud, since encryption is built in. Plus, the huge scale of cloud means it can run apps faster.

Cloud companies can also be more efficient with space and power. At Google, we buy enough wind and solar to offset the electricity we use, so our customers can get sustainability benefits they might not get on their own.

Cooling towers at a data center in Belgium.png — *Cooling towers at a data center in Belgium*

How does cloud affect your everyday life?

When businesses started using the cloud, their customers started using the cloud, too. It makes lots of what we do on our phones, tablets, and laptops possible. For example, Gmail became popular pretty quickly, because it offered a lot more storage so you could keep all your emails—even ones with large attachments. Gmail works because instead of storing emails on one limited server somewhere, a giant network of servers stores those emails. When you check your email, a server in one of those data centers is finding and downloading your newest emails and routing them to your computer or phone. Plus, because Gmail is cloud-based, this opens up opportunities for machine learning to help you in ways you might not notice, like blocking phishing and spam attempts to your inbox.

What do people talk about at a cloud conference?

When 30,000 or so people converge in San Francisco at Google Cloud Next ’19 this week, they’ll be choosing from hundreds of sessions, panels, and tutorials to learn about cloud computing. Some attendees may be just getting started with the cloud and need to learn the basics, while others are exploring advanced concepts like AI and machine learning. Lots of the sessions explain how Google Cloud-specific products can be used. There are sessions on connecting products from outside of Google Cloud into ours and showing business users how to move their data into the cloud.

That’s your start to understanding cloud. If you want to learn more, tune in to our Next livestream all week.

Source: Gmail Blog

Hitting send on the next 15 years of Gmail

Back in 2004, email looked a lot different than it does today. Inboxes were overtaken by spam, and there was no easy way to search your inbox or file messages away. Plus, you had to constantly delete emails to stay under the storage limit. We built Gmail to address these problems, and it’s grown into a product that 1.5 billion users rely on to get things done every day. Today, on Gmail’s 15 birthday, we’re taking a look back and sharing where we’re headed next.

Different from day one

On April 1, 2004 we launched Gmail (despite the timing, not a joke). It had the power of Google Search built right in and grouped your messages into conversation threads, making it easier to find and reply to them. You could also store 1GB of data for free—nearly 100 times what was available at the time. No wonder the world thought it was a prank.

In the mid-2000s, email spam was a serious issue. Gmail blocked spam before it ever reached your inbox, and created a way for people to report suspected spam when they saw it, to help make email safer. Over the years, we’ve enhanced our spam filtering capabilities with artificial intelligence and today, AI helps us block nearly 10 million spam emails every minute.

This video from 2007 demonstrates how Gmail fights spam.

When Gmail launched, the first Android-powered smartphones were still years away. As mobile devices became ubiquitous, Gmail evolved from being desktop-only to also work on your phone or tablet, helping you get more done on the go. Gmail's tabbed inbox feature was the first of its kind, helping you organize messages by category, so you can see what’s new at a glance. AI-powered features like Smart Reply and Nudges helped you reply faster and stay on top of your to-dos.

What’s next for Gmail

Gmail has evolved a lot over the past 15 years. Before we blow out our birthday candles, here’s a rundown of new features coming your way.

First off, we’re making Gmail more assistive. You may have already used Smart Compose, an AI-powered feature that helps you write emails quicker. It’s already saved people from typing over 1 billion characters each week—that’s enough to fill the pages of 1,000 copies of "Lord of the Rings.” Today, we’re updating Smart Compose to include more languages (Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese) and bringing it to Android (previously, it was only available on Pixel 3 devices), with iOS coming soon.

Smart Compose is also getting, well, smarter. It will personalize suggestions for you, so if you prefer saying “Ahoy," or “Ello, mate” in your greetings, Smart Compose will suggest just that. It can also suggest a subject line based on the email you’ve written.

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Next up, you can decide when your email gets delivered to someone else’s inbox. Today, we added a new feature that lets you schedule email to be sent at a more appropriate date or time, which is helpful if you’re working across time zones, or want to avoid interrupting someone’s vacation.

Lastly, you can now take action without leaving your inbox. You can respond to a comment thread in Google Docs, browse hotel recommendations and more, directly within emails. This way you don’t have to open a new tab or app to get things done.

We may have launched Gmail on April Fools’ Day, but the last 15 years have been no joke. And we’re looking forward to what’s to come.

Source: Gmail Blog

Making Gmail on mobile better for you

If you’ve used Gmail on the web in the past year, you probably noticed its new features that were designed to help you get things done quickly.

With machine learning, Gmail can help you draft emails faster using Smart Compose, or reply to messages quicker with suggested responses generated by Smart Reply. It can also “nudge” you to follow up on emails with subtle reminders in your inbox, and notify you to reply to threads so that you can prioritize what’s important or overdue.

Today, we’re kicking off the year with a new look for Gmail on mobile, too. As part of the new design, you can quickly view attachments—like photos—without opening or scrolling through the conversation. It’s also easier to switch between personal and work accounts, so you can access all of your emails without breaking a sweat. And just like on the web, you’ll get big, red warnings to alert you when something looks phish-y.

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This update is part of a larger effort to make G Suite look and act like a family of products, designed in the Google Material Theme with ease-of-use in mind. We’ve already updated the web experiences for Gmail, Drive, Calendar, and most recently Google Docs and Sites. In the coming weeks, you’ll see the new mobile design in Gmail on Android and iOS, with more G Suite mobile apps to follow later this year.

Source: Gmail Blog

Tips from the people behind your favorite Google products

I’m one of those people who always cuts it close at the airport—it’s a race through security, with just enough time to grab the airline essentials: water bottle, magazine, a soft pretzel if I’m lucky. But I just learned that I can whip out Google Maps to find my way around the airport (by searching the airport name and terminal number), so I no longer waste time running around looking for my snack of choice.

For two decades, Google has built products that make my life more useful. Eight of these products now have a billion users, and with all that extra time at the airport, I got to thinking—how many other unknown tips and tricks are out there? Since Google is celebrating its 20th birthday this month, I present a party favor: tips on Google’s most-used products, straight from the people who helped build them.

Search

For lovers of covers:Try searching for a song and then tapping “other recordings” for different renditions.
Don’t burn daylight: Make the most of your daylight hours by knowing when the sun will go down. Search [sunset] to get the time the sun will set today.
For content connoisseurs:If you’re a fan of bingeable TV shows or a movie buff, you can see all the places to stream any show or film by searching [watch] followed by the title. (Head’s up: this is available in the U.S., Great Britain, Australia, Germany and India).

Emily Moxley, Director of Product Management

Maps

Beat the crowds:Use Google Maps to find out the estimated wait times and popular times to visit your favorite restaurants and businesses.
Don’t get lost in the parking lot:If you’ve ever spent way too long searching for your parked car, this tip’s for you. After navigating to your destination, tap on the blue dot and then “Set as parking location” so you can always find your way back to your parking spot.
Quickest route to the airport snacks:If you’re flying to a new place, you can use Google Maps to help you find your way around an airport. A quick search for an airport terminal name, say “SFO Terminal 1,” will show you the lay of the land, including nearby gates, lounges, restaurants and stores.

Dane Glasgow, VP of Product

YouTube

Just add popcorn:Developed to cut down on glare and give you that movie theater experience, Dark Theme turns your background dark while you’re watching YouTube. It’s available on desktop, iOS and now rolling out to Android.
Pick your pace:Speed up or slow down the playback of a video by tapping on the three dots at the bottom right of any video.
Take a shortcut:While watching a YouTube video, use the numbered keys to seek in a video. For example, hitting “2” will take you 20 percent into the video, “6” will take you to 60 percent into the video, “0” will restart the video.

Brian Marquardt, Director of Product Management

Gmail

The ultimate to-do list: Open Tasks in your side panel within Gmail, then drag and drop emails to turn your messages into action items.
Shhhh:Declutter your inbox with Gmail’s mute feature, which pushes the entire conversation to your archive and any future conversations on the thread bypass your inbox to be automatically archived as well.
Take it back:Don’t fret over embarrassing typos, unintentional reply-alls, or other email taboos. In your Gmail settings, just implement a 5-30 second cancellation period on your sent emails and once you’ve fired one off, you’ll receive a prompt to “Undo.”

Kevin Smilak, Engineering Director

Google Drive

Give your docs a gold star:Find your favorite Drive items by starring your most important docs within the Drive main menu, and then bookmarking your Starred page.
File_name_V2:Freeze moments in time by naming different versions of the docs you edit frequently. In a Doc, Sheet, or Slides go to File > Version History > Name current version. Name any version then access it easily from "Version history" by name.
Your search is our command:Google Drive makes the text within all of the images and PDFs you upload searchable. Try searching for a phrase that you know is inside a picture or PDF, which is especially helpful when you can’t remember your filename.

Alexander Vogenthaler, Director of Product Management

Android

Lost and found:If you’ve misplaced your Android phone, Find My Device lets you locate it by signing into your Google account. Or you can call it directly from a browser by typing “find my device” on Google. Lock your phone remotely or display a message on the lock screen, so if someone finds it they know who to contact. If you’re convinced it’s lost for good, you can erase all your data.
Always reachable:Don’t miss any urgent phone calls and messages from important contacts like close family members or your child’s school, even when you have Do Not Disturb turned on. Just add a star to people that matter to you, and then allow calls and messages from “starred contacts only” in Do Not Disturb settings.
Use your voice:You can ask your Google Assistant to handle tasks on your Android phone (running Android 6.0 Marshmallow or later). Start by saying “OK Google,” then try “take a screenshot,” “turn on flashlight,” or “open WiFi setting.” You can even ask to “take a selfie”—this will open the camera app and start a countdown. Cheeeeeeeese.

Sagar Kamdar, Director of Product Management

Google Play

When you’re good with faces, but not names:Just hit pause on your movie, tap the circle around the actor or actress's face, and learn more about them and what other movies they’ve been in.
Read like a superhero: When you’re reading a comic on your phone, tap on a voice bubble and use your volume buttons to zoom in on the dialogue between two characters.
What you wish for:You can create a wishlist to keep track of items you want to install or purchase on Google Play.

Kara Bailey, Global Merchandising Director

Chrome

Access history across devices:Open Chrome and click on “History.” From the drop down menu, click “Full History” and “Tabs From Other Devices.” If you’re signed into the same Google account on both your phone and your computer, you’ll see the article you were just about to finish on your way into work.
Keeping tabs on your tabs:You can save eight days of time per year using keyboard shortcuts. Try this one in Chrome: jump between tabs at light speed by pressing Ctrl and the tab number you want to go to (i.e., Ctrl+1, Ctrl+2, Ctrl+3).
?☝? = ?. Right-click in any text field for a shortcut to access emoji on any platform Chrome can be found.

Ellie Powers, Group Product Manager, and Chris Beckmann, Product Management Director

So many tips, so much saved time.

Source: Gmail Blog

Inbox is signing off: find your favorite features in the new Gmail

Inbox by Gmail has been a great place to experiment with new ideas like snoozing emails to later, as well as try the latest AI-powered experiences like Smart Reply, Nudges and high-priority notifications to help you stay productive.

Four years after launching Inbox in 2014, we've learned a lot about how to make email better—and we’ve taken popular Inbox experiences and added them into Gmail to help more than a billion people get more done with their emails everyday. As we look to the future, we want to take a more focused approach that will help us bring the best email experience to everyone. As a result, we’re planning to focus solely on Gmail and say goodbye to Inbox by Gmail at the end of March 2019.

We introduced the new Gmail in April this year, incorporating many of the same features you’ve come to love about Inbox plus newer features like Smart Compose, which helps you draft emails faster. Read more about how these features in Gmail can help you manage your inbox better in this post.

We know change is hard, so we’ve created a transition guide to help you switch from Inbox to the new Gmail with ease. All your conversations are already waiting for you in Gmail. See you there.

Source: Gmail Blog

5 ways the new Gmail can help you get more done

We launched the new Gmail earlier this year and packed it with features to help you prioritize and accomplish things right from your inbox. And it’s a good thing too, because it’s estimated that we send and receive more than 100 emails a day.

With this volume, it can be tough to stay focused on what matters. Here are five ways the new Gmail can help you save time and get more done.

1. You can prioritize emails more easily.

How many times have you read an email and forgotten to respond? It’s easy to do. To help you remember, Gmail will “nudge” you to follow up or reply to messages by sharing a quick reminder next to the email. Powered by machine learning, it uses cues like frequent contacts and more to remind you to respond to stuff that’s higher priority.

Or if you have an email that you can’t get to right away, you can “Snooze” and choose how long before you see the message again.

2. You can write and reply to emails faster.

Sometimes it’s tough to put pen to, err … keyboard. So we’ve incorporated a new machine learning-powered feature in Gmail called Smart Compose, which suggests phrases to help you complete sentences in your emails so that you can draft them quicker.

And if you want to reply to emails quicker, you can use Smart Reply, which suggests responses at the bottom of a message—great for dealing with emails on the go.

3. You can work offline.

No internet access but have a lot to get done? We’ve got you covered. Enable Gmail’s offline mode to load, read, respond to and search your conversations even when you aren't connected to the internet. Simply type in “mail.google.com” in Chrome and you’re good to go.

4. You can get stuff done without leaving your inbox.

The new Gmail gives you quick access to apps you use often, like Google Calendar, Keep and Tasks without leaving your inbox. You can even find more Add-ons to download and customize your inbox. One fun one to check out is the Gyfcat Add-on, because sometimes this is the only appropriate way to end an email.

5. It helps you keep your information safe.

Ever accidentally clicked into a sketchy email? Gmail helps you avoid spammers by proactively warning you when something looks phish-y. If you try to click into a potential spam or phishing message, you’ll get a big, red alert that tells you it looks dangerous.

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The new Gmail, now available for everyone, is smarter and easier to use so your inbox can help you do more at home or at work. Looking for more? Check out this hidden gem for tips on how to stay even more productive at the workplace.

Source: Gmail Blog

100 announcements (!) from Google Cloud Next ’17

San Francisco — What a week! Google Cloud Next ‘17 has come to the end, but really, it’s just the beginning. We welcomed 10,000+ attendees including customers, partners, developers, IT leaders, engineers, press, analysts, cloud enthusiasts (and skeptics). Together we engaged in 3 days of keynotes, 200+ sessions, and 4 invitation-only summits. Hard to believe this was our first show as all of Google Cloud with GCP, G Suite, Chrome, Maps and Education. Thank you to all who were here with us in San Francisco this week, and we hope to see you next year.

If you’re a fan of video highlights, we’ve got you covered. Check out our Day 1 keynote(in less than 4 minutes) and Day 2 keynote (in under 5!).

One of the common refrains from customers and partners throughout the conference was “Wow, you’ve been busy. I can’t believe how many announcements you’ve had at Next!” So we decided to count all the announcements from across Google Cloud and in fact we had 100 (!) announcements this week.

For the list lovers amongst you, we’ve compiled a handy-dandy run-down of our announcements from the past few days:

Google Cloud is excited to welcome two new acquisitions to the Google Cloud family this week, Kaggle and AppBridge.

1. Kaggle - Kaggle is one of the world's largest communities of data scientists and machine learning enthusiasts. Kaggle and Google Cloud will continue to support machine learning training and deployment services in addition to offering the community the ability to store and query large datasets.

2. AppBridge - Google Cloud acquired Vancouver-based AppBridge this week, which helps you migrate data from on-prem file servers into G Suite and Google Drive.

Google Cloud brings a suite of new security features to Google Cloud Platform and G Suite designed to help safeguard your company’s assets and prevent disruption to your business:

3. Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP) for Google Cloud Platform (Beta) - Identity-Aware Proxy lets you provide access to applications based on risk, rather than using a VPN. It provides secure application access from anywhere, restricts access by user, identity and group, deploys with integrated phishing resistant Security Key and is easier to setup than end-user VPN.

4. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for Google Cloud Platform (Beta) - Data Loss Prevention API lets you scan data for 40+ sensitive data types, and is used as part of DLP in Gmail and Drive. You can find and redact sensitive data stored in GCP, invigorate old applications with new sensitive data sensing “smarts” and use predefined detectors as well as customize your own.

5. Key Management Service (KMS) for Google Cloud Platform (GA) - Key Management Service allows you to generate, use, rotate, and destroy symmetric encryption keys for use in the cloud.

6. Security Key Enforcement (SKE) for Google Cloud Platform (GA)- Security Key Enforcement allows you to require security keys be used as the 2-Step verification factor for enhanced anti-phishing security whenever a GCP application is accessed.

7. Vault for Google Drive (GA) - Google Vault is the eDiscovery and archiving solution for G Suite. Vault enables admins to easily manage their G Suite data lifecycle and search, preview and export the G Suite data in their domain. Vault for Drive enables full support for Google Drive content, including Team Drive files.

8. Google-designed security chip, Titan - Google uses Titan to establish hardware root of trust, allowing us to securely identify and authenticate legitimate access at the hardware level. Titan includes a hardware random number generator, performs cryptographic operations in the isolated memory, and has a dedicated secure processor (on-chip).

New GCP data analytics products and services help organizations solve business problems with data, rather than spending time and resources building, integrating and managing the underlying infrastructure:

9. BigQuery Data Transfer Service (Private Beta) - BigQuery Data Transfer Service makes it easy for users to quickly get value from all their Google-managed advertising datasets. With just a few clicks, marketing analysts can schedule data imports from Google Adwords, DoubleClick Campaign Manager, DoubleClick for Publishers and YouTube Content and Channel Owner reports.

10. Cloud Dataprep (Private Beta) - Cloud Dataprep is a new managed data service, built in collaboration with Trifacta, that makes it faster and easier for BigQuery end-users to visually explore and prepare data for analysis without the need for dedicated data engineer resources.

11. New Commercial Datasets - Businesses often look for datasets (public or commercial) outside their organizational boundaries. Commercial datasets offered include financial market data from Xignite, residential real-estate valuations (historical and projected) from HouseCanary, predictions for when a house will go on sale from Remine, historical weather data from AccuWeather, and news archives from Dow Jones,all immediately ready for use in BigQuery (with more to come as new partners join the program).

12. Python for Google Cloud Dataflow in GA - Cloud Dataflow is a fully managed data processing service supporting both batch and stream execution of pipelines. Until recently, these benefits have been available solely to Java developers. Now there’s a Python SDK for Cloud Dataflow in GA.

13. Stackdriver Monitoring for Cloud Dataflow (Beta) - We’ve integrated Cloud Dataflow with Stackdriver Monitoring so that you can access and analyze Cloud Dataflow job metrics and create alerts for specific Dataflow job conditions.

14. Google Cloud Datalab in GA - This interactive data science workflow tool makes it easy to do iterative model and data analysis in a Jupyter notebook-based environment using standard SQL, Python and shell commands.

15. Cloud Dataproc updates - Our fully managed service for running Apache Spark, Flink and Hadoop pipelines has new support for restarting failed jobs (including automatic restart as needed) in beta, the ability to create single-node clusters for lightweight sandbox development, in beta, GPU support, and the cloud labels feature, for more flexibility managing your Dataproc resources, is now GA.

New GCP databases and database features round out a platform on which developers can build great applications across a spectrum of use cases:

16. Cloud SQL for Postgre SQL (Beta) - Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL implements the same design principles currently reflected in Cloud SQL for MySQL, namely, the ability to securely store and connect to your relational data via open standards.

17. Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise (GA)- Available on Google Compute Engine, plus support for Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) and SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability (GA).

18. Cloud SQL for MySQL improvements- Increased performance for demanding workloads via 32-core instances with up to 208GB of RAM, and central management of resources via Identity and Access Management (IAM) controls.

19. Cloud Spanner - Launched a month ago, but still, it would be remiss not to mention it because, hello, it’s Cloud Spanner! The industry’s first horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service.

20. SSD persistent-disk performance improvements - SSD persistent disks now have increased throughput and IOPS performance, which are particularly beneficial for database and analytics workloads. Read these docs for complete details about persistent-disk performance.

21. Federated query on Cloud Bigtable - We’ve extended BigQuery’s reach to query data inside Cloud Bigtable, the NoSQL database service for massive analytic or operational workloads that require low latency and high throughput (particularly common in Financial Services and IoT use cases).

New GCP Cloud Machine Learning services bolster our efforts to make machine learning accessible to organizations of all sizes and sophistication:

22. Cloud Machine Learning Engine (GA) - Cloud ML Engine, now generally available, is for organizations that want to train and deploy their own models into production in the cloud.

23. Cloud Video Intelligence API (Private Beta) - A first of its kind, Cloud Video Intelligence API lets developers easily search and discover video content by providing information about entities (nouns such as “dog,” “flower”, or “human” or verbs such as “run,” “swim,” or “fly”) inside video content.

24. Cloud Vision API (GA) - Cloud Vision API reaches GA and offers new capabilities for enterprises and partners to classify a more diverse set of images. The API can now recognize millions of entities from Google’s Knowledge Graph and offers enhanced OCR capabilities that can extract text from scans of text-heavy documents such as legal contracts or research papers or books.

25. Machine learning Advanced Solution Lab (ASL) - ASL provides dedicated facilities for our customers to directly collaborate with Google’s machine-learning experts to apply ML to their most pressing challenges.

26. Cloud Jobs API- A powerful aid to job search and discovery, Cloud Jobs API now has new features such as Commute Search, which will return relevant jobs based on desired commute time and preferred mode of transportation.

27. Machine Learning Startup Competition - We announced a Machine Learning Startup Competition in collaboration with venture capital firms Data Collective and Emergence Capital, and with additional support from a16z, Greylock Partners, GV, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital.

New GCP pricing continues our intention to create customer-friendly pricing that’s as smart as our products; and support services that are geared towards meeting our customers where they are:

28. Compute Engine price cuts - Continuing our history of pricing leadership, we’ve cut Google Compute Engine prices by up to 8%.

29. Committed Use Discounts - With Committed Use Discounts, customers can receive a discount of up to 57% off our list price, in exchange for a one or three year purchase commitment paid monthly, with no upfront costs.

30. Free trial extended to 12 months- We’ve extended our free trial from 60 days to 12 months, allowing you to use your $300 credit across all GCP services and APIs, at your own pace and schedule. Plus, we’re introduced new Always Free products -- non-expiring usage limits that you can use to test and develop applications at no cost. Visit the Google Cloud Platform Free Tier page for details.

31. Engineering Support - Our new Engineering Support offering is a role-based subscription model that allows us to match engineer to engineer, to meet you where your business is, no matter what stage of development you’re in. It has 3 tiers:

Development engineering support - ideal for developers or QA engineers that can manage with a response within four to eight business hours, priced at $100/user per month.
Production engineering support provides a one-hour response time for critical issues at $250/user per month.
On-call engineering support pages a Google engineer and delivers a 15-minute response time 24x7 for critical issues at $1,500/user per month.

32. Cloud.google.com/community site - Google Cloud Platform Community is a new site to learn, connect and share with other people like you, who are interested in GCP. You can follow along with tutorials or submit one yourself, find meetups in your area, and learn about community resources for GCP support, open source projects and more.

New GCP developer platforms and tools reinforce our commitment to openness and choice and giving you what you need to move fast and focus on great code.

33. Google AppEngine Flex (GA) - We announced a major expansion of our popular App Engine platform to new developer communities that emphasizes openness, developer choice, and application portability.

34. Cloud Functions (Beta)- Google Cloud Functions has launched into public beta. It is a serverless environment for creating event-driven applications and microservices, letting you build and connect cloud services with code.

35. Firebase integration with GCP (GA) - Firebase Storage is now Google Cloud Storage for Firebase and adds support for multiple buckets, support for linking to existing buckets, and integrates with Google Cloud Functions.

36. Cloud Container Builder - Cloud Container Builder is a standalone tool that lets you build your Docker containers on GCP regardless of deployment environment. It’s a fast, reliable, and consistent way to package your software into containers as part of an automated workflow.

37. Community Tutorials (Beta) - With community tutorials, anyone can now submit or request a technical how-to for Google Cloud Platform.

Secure, global and high-performance, we’ve built our cloud for the long haul. This week we announced a slew of new infrastructure updates.

38. New data center region: California - This new GCP region delivers lower latency for customers on the West Coast of the U.S. and adjacent geographic areas. Like other Google Cloud regions, it will feature a minimum of three zones, benefit from Google’s global, private fibre network, and offer a complement of GCP services.

39. New data center region: Montreal - This new GCP region delivers lower latency for customers in Canada and adjacent geographic areas. Like other Google Cloud regions, it will feature a minimum of three zones, benefit from Google’s global, private fibre network, and offer a complement of GCP services.

40. New data center region: Netherlands - This new GCP region delivers lower latency for customers in Western Europe and adjacent geographic areas. Like other Google Cloud regions, it will feature a minimum of three zones, benefit from Google’s global, private fibre network, and offer a complement of GCP services.

41. Google Container Engine - Managed Nodes - Google Container Engine (GKE) has added Automated Monitoring and Repair of your GKE nodes, letting you focus on your applications while Google ensures your cluster is available and up-to-date.

42. 64 Core machines + more memory- We have doubled the number of vCPUs you can run in an instance from 32 to 64 and up to 416GB of memory per instance.

43. Internal Load balancing (GA) - Internal Load Balancing, now GA, lets you run and scale your services behind a private load balancing IP address which is accessible only to your internal instances, not the internet.

44. Cross-Project Networking (Beta) - Cross-Project Networking (XPN), now in beta, is a virtual network that provides a common network across several Google Cloud Platform projects, enabling simple multi-tenant deployments.

In the past year, we’ve launched 300+ features and updates for G Suite and this week we announced our next generation of collaboration and communication tools.

45. Team Drives (GA for G Suite Business, Education and Enterprise customers) - Team Drives help teams simply and securely manage permissions, ownership and file access for an organization within Google Drive.

46. Drive File Stream (EAP) - Drive File Stream is a way to quickly stream files directly from the cloud to your computer With Drive File Steam, company data can be accessed directly from your laptop, even if you don’t have much space on your hard drive.

47. Google Vault for Drive (GA for G Suite Business, Education and Enterprise customers ) - Google Vault for Drive now gives admins the governance controls they need to manage and secure all of their files, including employee Drives and Team Drives. Google Vault for Drive also lets admins set retention policies that automatically keep what’s needed and delete what’s not.

48. Quick Access in Team Drives (GA) - powered by Google’s machine intelligence, Quick Access helps to surface the right information for employees at the right time within Google Drive. Quick Access now works with Team Drives on iOS and Android devices, and is coming soon to the web.

49. Hangouts Meet (GA to existing customers) - Hangouts Meet is a new video meeting experience built on the Hangouts that can run 30-person video conferences without accounts, plugins or downloads. For G Suite Enterprise customers, each call comes with a dedicated dial-in phone number so that team members on the road can join meetings without wifi or data issues.

50. Hangouts Chat (EAP) - Hangouts Chat is an intelligent communication app in Hangouts with dedicated, virtual rooms that connect cross-functional enterprise teams. Hangouts Chat integrates with G Suite apps like Drive and Docs, as well as photos, videos and other third-party enterprise apps.

51. @meet - @meet is an intelligent bot built on top of the Hangouts platform that uses natural language processing and machine learning to automatically schedule meetings for your team with Hangouts Meet and Google Calendar.

52. Gmail Add-ons for G Suite (Developer Preview) - Gmail Add-ons provide a way to surface the functionality of your app or service directly in Gmail. With Add-ons, developers only build their integration once, and it runs natively in Gmail on web, Android and iOS.

53. Edit Opportunities in Google Sheets - with Edit Opportunities in Google Sheets, sales reps can sync a Salesforce Opportunity List View to Sheets to bulk edit data and changes are synced automatically to Salesforce, no upload required.

54. Jamboard - Our whiteboard in the cloud goes GA in May! Jamboard merges the worlds of physical and digital creativity. It’s real time collaboration on a brilliant scale, whether your team is together in the conference room or spread all over the world.

Building on the momentum from a growing number of businesses using Chrome digital signage and kiosks, we added new management tools and APIs in addition to introducing support for Android Kiosk apps on supported Chrome devices.

55. Android Kiosk Apps for Chrome - Android Kiosk for Chrome lets users manage and deploy Chrome digital signage and kiosks for both web and Android apps. And with Public Session Kiosks, IT admins can now add a number of Chrome packaged apps alongside hosted apps.

56. Chrome Kiosk Management Free trial - This free trial gives customers an easy way to test out Chrome for signage and kiosk deployments.

57. Chrome Device Management (CDM) APIs for Kiosks - These APIs offer programmatic access to various Kiosk policies. IT admins can schedule a device reboot through the new APIs and integrate that functionality directly in a third- party console.

58. Chrome Stability API - This new API allows Kiosk app developers to improve the reliability of the application and the system.

Attendees at Google Cloud Next ‘17 heard stories from many of our valued customers:

59. Colgate - Colgate-Palmolive partnered with Google Cloud and SAP to bring thousands of employees together through G Suite collaboration and productivity tools. The company deployed G Suite to 28,000 employees in less than six months.

60. Disney Consumer Products & Interactive (DCPI) - DCPI is on target to migrate out of its legacy infrastructure this year, and is leveraging machine learning to power next generation guest experiences.

61. eBay - eBay uses Google Cloud technologies including Google Container Engine, Machine Learning and AI for its ShopBot, a personal shopping bot on Facebook Messenger.

62. HSBC - HSBC is one of the world's largest financial and banking institutions and making a large investment in transforming its global IT. The company is working closely with Google to deploy Cloud DataFlow, BigQuery and other data services to power critical proof of concept projects.

63. LUSH - LUSH migrated its global e-commerce site from AWS to GCP in less than six weeks, significantly improving the reliability and stability of its site. LUSH benefits from GCP’s ability to scale as transaction volume surges, which is critical for a retail business. In addition, Google's commitment to renewable energy sources aligns with LUSH's ethical principles.

64. Oden Technologies - Oden was part of Google Cloud’s startup program, and switched its entire platform to GCP from AWS. GCP offers Oden the ability to reliably scale while keeping costs low, perform under heavy loads and consistently delivers sophisticated features including machine learning and data analytics.

65. Planet - Planet migrated to GCP in February, looking to accelerate their workloads and leverage Google Cloud for several key advantages: price stability and predictability, custom instances, first-class Kubernetes support, and Machine Learning technology. Planet also announced the beta release of their Explorer platform.

66. Schlumberger - Schlumberger is making a critical investment in the cloud, turning to GCP to enable high-performance computing, remote visualization and development velocity. GCP is helping Schlumberger deliver innovative products and services to its customers by using HPC to scale data processing, workflow and advanced algorithms.

67. The Home Depot - The Home Depot collaborated with GCP’s Customer Reliability Engineering team to migrate HomeDepot.com to the cloud in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Moving to GCP has allowed the company to better manage huge traffic spikes at peak shopping times throughout the year.

68. Verizon - Verizon is deploying G Suite to more than 150,000 of its employees, allowing for collaboration and flexibility in the workplace while maintaining security and compliance standards. Verizon and Google Cloud have been working together for more than a year to bring simple and secure productivity solutions to Verizon’s workforce.

We brought together Google Cloud partners from our growing ecosystem across G Suite, GCP, Maps, Devices and Education. Our partnering philosophy is driven by a set of principles that emphasize openness, innovation, fairness, transparency and shared success in the cloud market. Here are some of our partners who were out in force at the show:

69. Accenture - Accenture announced that it has designed a mobility solution for Rentokil, a global pest control company, built in collaboration with Google as part of the partnership announced at Horizon in September.

70. Alooma - Alooma announced the integration of the Alooma service with Google Cloud SQL and BigQuery.

71. Authorized Training Partner Program - To help companies scale their training offerings more quickly, and to enable Google to add other training partners to the ecosystem, we are introducing a new track within our partner program to support their unique offerings and needs.

72. Check Point - Check Point® Software Technologies announced Check Point vSEC for Google Cloud Platform, delivering advanced security integrated with GCP as well as their joining of the Google Cloud Technology Partner Program.

73. CloudEndure - We’re collaborating with CloudEndure to offer a no cost, self-service migration tool for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) customers.

74. Coursera - Coursera announced that it is collaborating with Google Cloud Platform to provide an extensive range of Google Cloud training course. To celebrate this announcement Coursera is offering all NEXT attendees a 100% discount for the GCP fundamentals class.

75. DocuSign - DocuSign announced deeper integrations with Google Docs.

76. Egnyte - Egnyte announced an enhanced integration with Google Docs that will allow our joint customers to create, edit, and store Google Docs, Sheets and Slides files right from within the Egnyte Connect.

77. Google Cloud Global Partner Awards - We recognized 12 Google Cloud partners that demonstrated strong customer success and solution innovation over the past year: Accenture, Pivotal, LumApps, Slack, Looker, Palo Alto Networks, Virtru, SoftBank, DoIT, Snowdrop Solutions, CDW Corporation, and SYNNEX Corporation.

78. iCharts - iCharts announced additional support for several GCP databases, free pivot tables for current Google BigQuery users, and a new product dubbed “iCharts for SaaS.”

79. Intel - In addition to the progress with Skylake, Intel and Google Cloud launched several technology initiatives and market education efforts covering IoT, Kubernetes and TensorFlow, including optimizations, a developer program and tool kits.

80. Intuit - Intuit announced Gmail Add-Ons, which are designed to integrate custom workflows into Gmail based on the context of a given email.

81. Liftigniter - Liftigniter is a member of Google Cloud’s startup program and focused on machine learning personalization using predictive analytics to improve CTR on web and in-app.

82. Looker - Looker launched a suite of Looker Blocks, compatible with Google BigQuery Data Transfer Service, designed to give marketers the tools to enhance analysis of their critical data.

83. Low interest loans for partners - To help Premier Partners grow their teams, Google announced that capital investment are available to qualified partners in the form of low interest loans.

84. MicroStrategy - MicroStrategy announced an integration with Google Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL and Google Cloud SQL for MySQL.

85. New incentives to accelerate partner growth - We are increasing our investments in multiple existing and new incentive programs; including, low interest loans to help Premier Partners grow their teams, increasing co-funding to accelerate deals, and expanding our rebate programs.

86. Orbitera Test Drives for GCP Partners - Test Drives allow customers to try partners’ software and generate high quality leads that can be passed directly to the partners’ sales teams. Google is offering Premier Cloud Partners one year of free Test Drives on Orbitera.

87. Partner specializations - Partners demonstrating strong customer success and technical proficiency in certain solution areas will now qualify to apply for a specialization. We’re launching specializations in application development, data analytics, machine learning and infrastructure.

88. Pivotal - GCP announced Pivotal as our first CRE technology partner. CRE technology partners will work hand-in-hand with Google to thoroughly review their solutions and implement changes to address identified risks to reliability.

89. ProsperWorks - ProsperWorks announced Gmail Add-Ons, which are designed to integrate custom workflows into Gmail based on the context of a given email.

90. Qwiklabs - Thisrecent acquisition will provide Authorized Training Partners the ability to offer hands-on labs and comprehensive courses developed by Google experts to our customers.

91. Rackspace - Rackspace announced a strategic relationship with Google Cloud to become its first managed services support partner for GCP, with plans to collaborate on a new managed services offering for GCP customers set to launch later this year.

92. Rocket.Chat - Rocket.Chat, a member of Google Cloud’s startup program, is adding a number of new product integrations with GCP including Autotranslate via Translate API, integration with Vision API to screen for inappropriate content, integration to NLP API to perform sentiment analysis on public channels, integration with GSuite for authentication and a full move of back-end storage to Google Cloud Storage.

93. Salesforce - Salesforce announced Gmail Add-Ons, which are designed to integrate custom workflows into Gmail based on the context of a given email.

94. SAP - This strategic partnership includes certification of SAP HANA on GCP, new G Suite integrations and future collaboration on building machine learning features into intelligent applications like conversational apps that guide users through complex workflows and transactions.

95. Smyte - Smyte participated in the Google Cloud startup program and protects millions of actions a day on websites and mobile applications. Smyte recently moved from self-hosted Kubernetes to Google Container Engine (GKE).

96. Veritas - Veritas expanded its partnership with Google Cloud to provide joint customers with 360 Data Management capabilities. The partnership will help reduce data storage costs, increase compliance and eDiscovery readiness and accelerate the customer’s journey to Google Cloud Platform.

97. VMware Airwatch - Airwatch provides enterprise mobility management solutions for Android and continues to drive the Google Device ecosystem to enterprise customers.

98. Windows Partner Program- We’re working with top systems integrators in the Windows community to help GCP customers take full advantage of Windows and .NET apps and services on our platform.

99. Xplenty - Xplenty announced the addition of two new services from Google Cloud into their available integrations: Google Cloud Spanner and Google Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL.

100. Zoomdata - Zoomdata announced support for Google’s Cloud Spanner and PostgreSQL on GCP, as well as enhancements to the existing Zoomdata Smart Connector for Google BigQuery. With these new capabilities Zoomdata offers deeply integrated and optimized support for Google Cloud Platform’s Cloud Spanner, PostgreSQL, Google BigQuery, and Cloud DataProc services.

We’re thrilled to have so many new products and partners that can help all of our customers grow. And as our final announcement for Google Cloud Next ’17 — please save the date for Next 2018: July 23-27 in San Francisco.

I guess that makes it 101. :-)

Source: Gmail Blog

Inbox by Gmail: Evolving the inbox to save you time

Staying on top of your to-do list can be a challenge. In order to get things done, you often need to hunt through your inbox to find what you’re looking for, whether it’s info about upcoming events, your next trip, or a news article you want to share with colleagues.

The team behind Inbox has made its mission to help you organize your email and save you time. Starting today, you'll discover more integrations that make it easier to see what's happening and then act with organized Trello and GitHub project updates and Google Alerts previews. You'll also see updates based on your feedback, including Google Drive integration.

Get organized Trello and GitHub project updates

The Inbox team has worked with Trello, a project management application, and GitHub, a software collaboration platform, to improve email notifications. If you use Trello, you'll get a summary of what's new with your Trello projects, so you can stay up-to-date on the latest updates. And for those of you who use GitHub, you’ll get a summary of code changes and filed issues for each repository.

Stay on top of your Google Alerts

To help you stay in the know on topics you care about, you can scan through your Google Alerts just like a newsletter. New alerts are summarized right in the inbox. If one of them catches your eye, you can click to read more. If not, you can quickly mark it as done.

Enjoy other updates based on your feedback

You'll also see a number of highly-requested features based on your feedback (thank you!):

If you use Google Drive, you can now insert Drive links into emails, check and fix permissions for those links, and save email attachments to Drive.
You can now drag-and-drop contacts between to, cc, and bcc in compose on web.
You can delete right from the inbox just as easily as you can mark as done.

What’s next?

If you're a company that sends emails, and are excited about our Trello and GitHub updates and want to make your emails more useful, contact us here — we are excited to work with more email senders directly over the coming months.

This is just the beginning: The Gmail team will continue to improve the email experience so you can spend less time dealing with email and more time being productive.

Source: Gmail Blog

Introducing Gmail Mic Drop

UPDATE April 1st 2pm: We heard feedback that some of you were negatively impacted by this feature, so we quickly turned it off late last night. In addition, we are working to bring back Mic-Dropped messages that had subsequent replies to your inbox, so you can read those.

We realize many of you use Gmail for very important messages, and we are sorry if Mic Drop was in any way harmful to you. Note that if you’re a Google Apps business, education or government user this feature was never turned on.

At Google we have a culture of sharing what we learned when things go wrong, and we want to share these learnings with you:

We should have asked you before turning on the feature, and it should have included a confirmation before sending.
We didn't anticipate accidental clicks: "Send + Mic Drop" was too close to other send buttons ("Send" as well as "Send & Archive"), which caused confusion.
And yes there was a bug. It was rare, but possible to press the regular "Send" button and still Mic Drop if you did the following:

Opened a new compose window
Pressed the “Send & Mic Drop” button with no recipients and saw error message
Edited the message by adding message recipient(s)
Pressed the regular send button.

Again, sorry. We love April Fools jokes at Google, and we regret that this joke missed the mark and disappointed you.

UPDATE April 1st 1am: Well, it looks like we pranked ourselves this year.? Due to a bug, the Mic Drop feature inadvertently caused more headaches than laughs. We’re truly sorry. The feature has been turned off. If you are still seeing it, please reload your Gmail page.

Email's great, but sometimes you just wanna hit the eject button. Like those heated threads at work, when everyone's wrong except you (obviously). Or those times when someone's seeking group approval, but your opinion is the only one that matters (amirite?). Or maybe you just nailed it, and there's nothing more to say (bam).

Today, Gmail is making it easier to have the last word on any email with Mic Drop. Simply reply to any email using the new 'Send + Mic Drop' button. Everyone will get your message, but that's the last you'll ever hear about it. Yes, even if folks try to respond, you won't see it.

When you drop the mic, your email will also include an explanatory image–just to help set expectations.

Friends and family have been testing Gmail Mic Drop for months, and the response so far has been awesome:

"Sending email is so much easier when you don't have to worry about people responding!"
"Mic Drop is a huge improvement over Mute! I can finally let everyone know I'm just not interested."
"My team solves problems so much faster with Mic Drop. In fact, we stopped talking to each other entirely!"

Gmail Mic Drop is launching first on the web, but mobile updates are on the way. So stay tuned, and stay saucy.

Source: Gmail Blog

Inbox by Gmail: Saving time with Snooze

Snoozing emails is great because it helps you focus on what you need to do now instead of what you can put off until later. Starting today, Snooze is getting a new look and two time-saving improvements — all based on your feedback.

First, Snooze is getting two highly-requested snooze times: Later this week and This weekend. These new options should hopefully save you some time, and decrease the need to use custom snooze.

snooze1.width-562.png — Snooze’s new look

Second, just like you can set your preferred morning time to receive emails, you can now choose the weekend days that work best for you.

snooze2.width-900.png — New weekend setting

This feature is especially useful for people living in places where the weekend spans different days of the week.

Look for these new options in Inbox over the next week. And don’t forget to continue sharing your feedback, so we can keep working on your top requests. Enjoy your snoozing :)