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Google Chat external interoperability with Microsoft Teams via NextPlane OpenHub is now available

Organizations often need to collaborate with customers, partners, and suppliers who use Microsoft Teams. NextPlane OpenHub was built to bridge this Google Chat and Microsoft Teams divide, and it is now launching external interoperability to allow communication across organizational boundaries. OpenHub directly connects Google Chat users to people on external Microsoft Teams tenants, making cross-platform collaboration more seamless.

This release supports external interoperability between Google Chat and Microsoft Teams, including presence, 1:1 chat, group chat, Channels and Spaces, file sharing, and meeting and call initiation. A single Google Workspace environment can connect to multiple external Microsoft Teams tenants via OpenHub, enabling cross-tenant collaboration through a single interoperability layer. OpenHub is designed to provide a familiar cross-platform collaboration experience without requiring all parties to use the same collaboration platform.

OpenHub is also designed to support enterprise governance and deployment requirements. It is deployed as a dedicated single-tenant service, can run in a customer-owned GCP project, and keeps customer data under customer control. It uses customer-managed identities and does not require fake user accounts, Nextplane-controlled user accounts, cross-tenant impersonation, or a proxy Teams tenant.

For Google Workspace admins and IT decision-makers, this can help reduce deployment friction through tightly scoped, auditable permissions aligned with customer best practices. Ongoing configuration and management are handled through the existing Google Admin console and Microsoft Teams admin center, without requiring a separate OpenHub administration console. This is especially important for Google Workspace customers working with external organizations, because it avoids imposing a separate portal or a new management process on customers, partners, and suppliers.

Examples of how this can be used include:

  • Collaborate with customers, partners, and suppliers who use Microsoft Teams
  • Support cross-Teams tenant collaboration from a single Google Workspace environment
  • Maintain cross-platform communication during multi-company projects, joint ventures, or extended partner workflows
  • Enable interoperability when domain validation requirements make internal interoperability difficult to deploy

Getting started

  • Admins: This feature requires administrator consent on both sides of the connection, and Workspace and Teams admins must register NextPlan OpenHub as an enterprise application with their respective platforms before use. Configuration is managed at the domain level through the Google Admin console and Microsoft Teams admin center. OpenHub does not require a separate administration console and is managed through existing platform controls. Visit the NextPlane site to learn more about connecting Teams and Workspace. 
  • End users: There is no end user setting for this feature.

Rollout pace

Availability

  • Business: Business Starter, Standard, and Plus
  • Enterprise: Enterprise Starter, Standard, and Plus
Note that separate NextPlane licensing is required to enable interoperability.

Resources

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Share chats, canvases, and generated media from the Gemini app securely via Google Drive

We are introducing the ability for Workspace users on the web to share snapshots of their chats, canvases, and generated media in the Gemini app. Because this feature is powered by the same underlying technology as Google Drive, it uses the familiar, consistent sharing interface you already rely on for Google Docs and other files. You can still choose to allow conversation sharing via link.

With this update, members of your organization can easily share Gemini workflows and build on top of what others have created, scaling AI competency and collaboration across teams and enabling new ways for educators and students to teach and learn.

Getting started

  • Admins: This feature will be ON by default and can be managed via a new Admin console setting. Additionally, sharing is governed by your organization’s existing Drive sharing policies. If Drive content is set to be shareable outside the organization, your Gemini assets will be as well. Visit the Help Center to learn more.

  • End users: If enabled by your admin, you can share your Gemini conversations, canvases, and media from the web interface using the standard Drive sharing menu.

Rollout pace

Availability

  • Available to all Google Workspace customers

Resources

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Prevent account takeovers with Device Bound Session Credentials (DBSC), now generally available in the Chrome browser for Windows

Previously available in beta, Device Bound Session Credentials (DBSC) in the Chrome browser on Windows is now generally available and enabled by default for Google Workspace users.

DBSC strengthens account security after users are logged in and helps bind a session cookie — small files used by websites to remember user information — to the device a user authenticated from. Even if malware was present on the user’s device, DBSC reduces the risk of session theft and makes it meaningfully more difficult for malicious actors to exploit stolen session cookies.

With this change to general availability, Workspace admins no longer need to take action to enable DBSC in the Admin console. Organizations can also bolster protections with more granular account attributes when using DBSC together with context-aware access (CAA). To monitor DBSC binding events, admins can view the audit logs available in the security investigation tool.

An example of the audit log and log details for a DBSC event in the admin console

Getting started

  • Admins: This feature is ON by default for all Google Workspace customers, and there is no administrator control to disable it.
  • End users: There is no end user setting for this feature.

Rollout pace

Availability

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

Resources

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The “What” and “Why” on Meridian: Ads DevCast E6

Measuring the true impact of your marketing spend is complex, especially when you look across channels and mediums. In Episode 6 of Google’s Ads DevCast, "The 'What' and 'Why' on Meridian," we sit down with Product Manager Katie Munro and Developer Relations Engineer Jeff Li to explore Meridian, Google's open-source Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) framework, and how it helps advertisers make data-backed strategic budget decisions.

Watch the full episode

Hear the full episode

Here is a summary of the talking points from our discussion on what Meridian is, how the math works, and the newly announced surfaces to help you implement it.

What is Meridian?

Meridian is Google's open-source Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) framework. It provides a holistic, privacy-safe view of marketing ROI by analyzing aggregated historical data across all channels (digital, TV, print) alongside non-advertising factors (seasonality, economic conditions). It helps you determine the incremental lift of your marketing (sales caused by ads) versus baseline sales (sales that would have happened anyway).

The Core Math: Hill Curves & Adstock

Meridian uses statistical models to capture the real-world behavior of advertising:

  • Hill Curves: Models diminishing returns, showing where you have room to increase spend (headroom) and where you have saturated a channel.
  • Adstock: Models the lagged effect and decay of advertising over time, capturing the delay between seeing an ad and making a purchase.

The Measurement Trifecta

Meridian completes the modern measurement framework:

  • Attribution (GA4): For day-to-day tactical campaign tweaks.
  • Incrementality Experiments (Meridian GeoX): To test specific hypotheses in the real world.
  • MMM (Meridian): For macro-level, strategic budget planning.

New Meridian Releases from GML 2026

We discuss three major additions designed to make MMM more accessible and accurate:

  • Meridian in GA360: A turnkey, integrated MMM solution within Google Analytics 360 that uses existing behavioral data to provide cross-channel ROI insights without requiring a data science background.
  • Meridian Studio: A Google Cloud-based enterprise platform to build and scale models, featuring native agentic AI to automate data quality checks, suggest model health improvements, and assist in scenario planning.
  • Meridian GeoX: An open-source geo-based incrementality solution that acts as a calibration engine, allowing you to run geographic experiments and feed "ground truth" causation data back into your Meridian model.

Next Steps:

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Chrome for Android Update

   Hi, everyone! We've just released Chrome 148 (148.0.7778.215) for Android. It'll become available on Google Play over the next few days. 

This release includes stability and performance improvements. You can see a full list of the changes in the Git log. If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug.


Android releases contain the same security fixes as their corresponding Desktop releases (Windows: 148.0.7778.216/217, Mac: 148.0.7778.215/216, Linux:  148.0.7778.215) unless otherwise noted.

Harry Souders
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Ask Gemini in Google Meet is becoming more easily accessible on web

In September 2025, we launched Ask Gemini in Meet, which brings the power of Gemini into your organization’s meetings. Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re making the feature more easily accessible by moving the Ask Gemini prompt box into the bottom left-hand corner of the Google Meet web interface:


Previously, Ask Gemini in Meet was available only by hovering over the icon in the top right corner. This change makes it much easier to discover and use this feature in Google Meet calls. Other than the entrypoint change, there are no changes to the Ask Gemini in Meet functionality itself.

As a reminder, you use Ask Gemini in Meet to:

  • Get a quick brief on the goals and topics for the meeting you’re in
  • List key takeaways, decisions, and action items mentioned in the meeting
  • Catch up on what you missed if you joined late (as long as Take Notes for Me was enabled)

Getting started

Rollout pace

Availability

  • Business: Business Standard and Plus
  • Enterprise: Enterprise Standard and Plus

Resources

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Easily identify data irregularities with anomaly detection in Connected Sheets

You can now easily identify critical irregularities and outliers in your time-series data when using Connected Sheets to analyze BigQuery data sets from Google Sheets. Anomaly detection in Connected Sheets allows users to distinguish between expected trends and true outliers without requiring manual model training or complex SQL knowledge.

Powered by BigQuery ML and TimesFM, this capability delivers "zero-shot" analysis, meaning you can uncover actionable AI insights immediately—no need to configure or wait for a model to be trained on your data. Anomaly detection also builds upon our recently introduced forecasting feature to provide a more comprehensive suite of predictive tools right where you already work.

Key features include:

  • Easy, SQL-free configuration: A user-friendly side panel guides you through configuring your anomaly detection analysis without writing a single line of SQL.
  • Clear, built-in formatting: Results are cleanly rendered with new columns for is_anomaly (a boolean indicator) and lower_bound/upper_bound intervals to help you quickly sort, filter, and interpret the findings. 
  • Customizable thresholds: Take control of your analysis by setting a specific time period, anomaly probability threshold (defaulting to 0.95), and filtering input data
  • Automated refresh ability: Just like other Connected Sheets objects, your anomaly detection extracts can be scheduled to refresh automatically, ensuring your insights are always current.

Getting started

  • Admins: There is no admin control for this feature.
  • End users: Access to anomaly detection in Connected Sheets requires permissions to a BigQuery project with billing enabled.

Rollout pace

Availability

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

Resources

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