Category Archives: Google Drive Blog

News and notes from the Google Drive team

Announcing new enterprise-grade controls and visibility in G Suite

Scale. Speed. Lower total cost of ownership. The cloud offers enterprises significant benefits and gives their teams a freedom that’s as big as their ambitions. G Suite supports such businesses around the world with our unified suite of intelligent apps. Today, more than 3 million paying businesses rely on G Suite to make working together easier, including Whirlpool, PWC, and Woolworths.

Having greater control and visibility when protecting sensitive assets, however, should also be a top concern in today’s world. That’s why starting today, we’re giving customers the critical control and visibility they expect (and their CTOs and regulators often require) in G Suite with:

More powerful access control for administrators with security key enforcement
More data control with Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for Google Drive, DLP for Gmail, and S/MIME for Gmail
More analytics and insights by connecting BigQuery with Gmail

Manage who can access your company’s devices and systems

Security key enforcement: In 2011, we introduced 2-step verification for added protection when users log into their Google accounts. With 2-step verification, admins can opt for their company to use Security Keys, which are both easier for users and more secure against common (phishing) attacks than other methods. Security Keys plug directly into a laptop or pair with a mobile device using Bluetooth or NFC, instead of receiving a code via text. Today, we’re adding the ability for admins to enforce this measure by restricting login solely to users with a Security Key. Admins will also be able to manage the deployment of Security Keys and view usage reports.

See how stripe enhances account security with G Suite

Stripe, a software platform for running an internet business, processes billions of dollars a year for hundreds of thousands of companies around the world. Everyday, Stripe employees rely on G Suite to communicate and collaborate quickly, effectively and securely. Security Key enforcement provides an added layer of protections for Stripe, with advanced authentication controls to combat phishing attempts and unauthorized email access.

"Businesses that run on Stripe trust us with some of their most sensitive information, and we take the security of that information extremely seriously. We've found Security Keys to be ideal second factors because they balance ease-of-use with increased account security. G Suite Security Key enforcement gives us a way to easily enforce secure logins for all employees, across both their desktop and now mobile devices, " says Bryan Berg, security team member at Stripe.

Control how data is shared beyond your company

Data loss prevention (DLP) for Google Drive: In 2015, we launched DLP for Gmail with easy-to-set-up rules, OCR image scan recognition and advanced customization. Today, we’re extending DLP to Google Drive, making it even easier for admins to secure sensitive data, control what content can be stored and protect users from accidentally sharing confidential information externally. G Suite’s DLP protection goes beyond standard DLP with easy-to-configure rules and OCR recognition of content stored in images so admins can easily enforce policies and control how data is shared.

S/MIME for Gmail: When it comes to Gmail security, there are dozens of security measures running behind the scenes to keep your emails safe, and we support industry-standard authentication to help combat email spoofing. Unfortunately, other email services that you exchange emails with might not take similar measures to protect your data. That’s why we’re offering additional protection by giving you the option to bring your own certificates for S/MIME encryption. Administrators will be able to enforce S/MIME usage and can set DLP rules based on specific organizational unit needs.

Understand employee behavior and activity

Gmail logs + BigQuery integration: Gmail logs contain valuable information that can help administrators diagnose issues or unlock insights. Today, we are making it easier to analyze Gmail logs with a preconfigured BigQuery integration so administrators can run sophisticated, high-performing custom queries, analyze their data and build custom dashboards.

Third-party email archiving: Google Vault helps you easily archive Gmail content while also complying with retention for legal holds and audit reporting. That said, some organizations use other third-party SMTP archiving solutions like HP Autonomy or Veritas. Today, we’re making it simple for you to integrate third-party archiving solutions of your choice with Gmail.

Part of the new G Suite Enterprise edition, today’s announcement is designed to provide the peace-of-mind our enterprise customers demand and deserve.

See how your business can innovate faster — and now even more securely — with G Suite by Google Cloud.

Source: Drive

See how G Suite and DocuSign help real estate brokers close deals faster

G Suite helps teams cut through clutter and get right down to business: accomplishing more with less rigmarole. In November, we welcomed DocuSign to the Recommended for G Suite Program to trim time businesses spend on e-signatures and approvals. This G Suite integration makes it easy to fast-track signatures with multiple signers, which is especially valuable for our customers in the real estate industry.

Sereno Group, a real estate brokerage firm in California, uses DocuSign and G Suite to schedule signings, maintain communication between agents and clients, and easily exchange paperwork. By using less complicated tools, agents can build their business and clientele faster.

“When our tools are easier to use, agents can spend less time managing paperwork and devote more time to their clients,” said Tim Proschold, VP of Group Strategy & Success at Sereno Group.

Sereno Group agents save time by using other G Suite integrations, like DocuSign for Google Drive and the DocuSign Gmail extension. Agents use Zipforms, online forms used by real estate agents, to store important deal information. Then others can go into these Zipforms, assemble important real estate, add in files or documents stored in Google Drive with the DocuSign for Google Drive integration and send materials to clients for them to sign. Tracking the status of signatures is easy with the DocuSign Gmail extension. Sereno Group agents can see the status of signatures directly in Gmail to know what’s pending and what’s complete.

Other brokers are catching on too. Chris Lopez, broker with World Class Properties, is saving time with DocuSign and G Suite: “I sign between five and 10 documents every day and I save up to 10 minutes on each document. That frees up nearly eight hours a week for me to focus on what’s important for my clients.”

These real estate agents are clearly on to something. According to DocuSign, Sereno Group real estate agents are using DocuSign tools more and more — last year they used 18,000 envelope signatures up from 5,500 the year before. To learn more about how to use G Suite and DocuSign for your business, sign up for this webinar on February 7, 2017 at 10am PST / 1pm EST.

Source: Drive

Customize your G Suite experience with App Maker and Recommended apps

G Suite is designed to help you do your best work, whether that’s through real-time collaboration that brings your teams together or machine intelligence that speeds up everyday tasks. But we understand your company has unique needs and workflows that G Suite alone wasn’t built to address. We also know your teams rely on many third-party apps for things like CRM, support, and project management to get their job done. So today, we’re announcing two new ways to customize and extend your experience on the G Suite platform: App Maker, a new low-code developer tool for building custom enterprise applications, and the addition of seven new partners to our “Recommended for G Suite” third-party partner program.

Introducing App Maker, a new way to build powerful apps for your business.

App Maker is a low-code, application development tool that lets you quickly build and deploy custom apps tailored to your organization’s needs. Whether you’re looking for better ways to onboard new team members, staff projects, or approve employee travel requests, App Maker helps you build an app for that in days instead of months.

Go from idea to app, fast: App Maker makes it easy for IT or even citizen developers (including analysts and system administrators) to quickly iterate from a prototype all the way to deployed app. It offers a powerful cloud-based IDE that features built-in templates, a drag-and-drop UI, and point-and-click data modeling to accelerate your app development efforts. App Maker also embraces open, and popular standards like HTML, CSS, Javascript and Google’s material design visual framework, so developers can build apps quickly, in a development environment that leverages their existing skills and knowledge.

Build integrated, tailor-made solutions for every need: App Maker lets you build a range of applications customized to meet the needs of your organization and connects to a wide range of data sources and APIs. This unique flexibility starts with built-in support for G Suite products as well as popular services such as Maps, Contacts, Groups and more. You can also leverage other Google Cloud services such as the Directory API and Prediction API, or third-party APIs, to create richer, more intelligent application experiences.
Focus on delivery, not infrastructure: App Maker is built on the same secure and trusted infrastructure as G Suite apps like Gmail, Drive and Docs. Developers can safely deploy custom apps in the cloud without worrying about servers, capacity planning, infrastructure security and monitoring that would otherwise require internal support from IT.

Over the past few months, we’ve previewed App Maker with a handful of large G Suite customers and many have already built and deployed applications to their organizations. We’re also working with the following consulting partners to help deliver solutions to our joint customers: Appsbroker, gPartner, G-Workplace, Ignite Synergy, Maven Wave, PwC, SADA Systems, and Tempus Nova.

Here are a few ways that enterprise customers and partners have used App Maker to make everyday business processes simpler and more efficient--whether it’s to track suspicious login activities, take analog claims processes and make them digital, or track office inventory orders.

If you’re interested in trying out App Maker, it’s available today through our Early Adopter Program for G Suite Business customers. Apply for the EAP here.

Announcing new apps for the ‘Recommended for G Suite’ program

While G Suite helps your teams communicate and collaborate more easily, we get that you also rely on third-party apps to manage other aspects of your business including sales, marketing, and operations. We want to make it easy for you to integrate these solutions with G Suite, and that’s why we introduced the Recommended for G Suite program last year. The program selects market leading applications, built by independent software vendors (ISVs), in a range of categories like project management, customer support, finance and accounting.

Today, we’re adding seven new apps to the program that can help you be more productive. These apps solve critical business problems and offer deep integration and direct support with G Suite. Each app also goes through rigorous security testing and quality measures to qualify for the Recommended for G Suite program.

Our new recommended partners include:

Asana for project & process management
DocuSign for eSignature
Freshdesk for customer support
LumApps for corporate & social portal
Virtru for encryption
Xero and Zoho Invoice for finance & accounting

Since we launched this program with our first eight apps last year, we’ve seen many examples of how our customers have incorporated them with G Suite to drive more value for their business. We’ve created a webinar series to show first-hand examples of this, and you can sign up here if you’re interested in attending. In addition, if you’re an ISV that’s interested in becoming a Recommended for G Suite partner, please submit your application here.

Try these new solutions today

We’re committed to helping you get the most out of your G Suite experience by fostering the best ecosystem of cloud applications and partners. App Maker enables you to build powerful apps tailored to your organizational needs, while the Recommended for G Suite program helps your teams select leading apps to grow your business. Both solutions are available today, and we encourage you to try them out.

Source: Drive

Jamboard — the whiteboard, reimagined for collaboration in the cloud

Bringing the right team together for a meeting or brainstorm can take an idea from being good to great. When we tap into ideas from teams across the globe, our work becomes more collaborative and productive. It doesn’t feel like...well, work.

At Google, we’ve set out to redefine meetings. So today, we’re introducing Jamboard — a collaborative, digital whiteboard that makes it easy for your team to share ideas in real-time and create without boundaries. We’re moving the whiteboard to the cloud.

Your team’s collaborative, cloud-first whiteboard

Jamboard raises the bar on collaborative creativity, bringing the same real-time collaboration found in G Suite, combined with the best of the web, to your team’s brainstorms and meetings. You can work with teammates from across the world on other Jamboards or remotely use the smartphone or tablet companion app.

Jamboard makes it easy to enrich your brainstorm with the power of Google Search and your team’s work in G Suite. Grab images and content from the web and bring them straight into your “jam.” Pull in work from Docs, Sheets and Slides, or add photos stored in Drive. To capture your ideas clearly, Jamboard is packed with tools like sticky notes and stencils as well as intelligent features like handwriting and shape recognition.

It’s a hassle when you use a whiteboard, reach the end of your meeting and have to quickly scramble to snap a picture of your work. How many times have you scribbled “do not erase” above your idea? Jamboard lets you take your work with you. When you “jam” with your colleagues, it lives in the cloud in Google Drive, so you can easily share what you’ve created or come back to iterate at anytime. Your brainstorm doesn’t have to end when the meeting does.

Designed for precision and ease

Jamboard is intelligently designed to speed up collaboration among your teams with a 55-inch 4k display that features a best-in-class touch response time. Combine this with a built-in HD camera, speakers and Wi-Fi, and you’re set up to collaborate and broadcast your work globally with Hangouts.

Jamboard’s touchscreen was built for precision drawing. It automatically recognizes the difference between using the stylus to sketch or the eraser to start over, and neither require batteries or pairing. Jamboard can also sense when you’re using your finger to wipe work off of the screen, just like a classic whiteboard (except you won’t get ink on your hand). The intuitive, single-cable setup makes it easy to start creating quickly with Jamboard — just wheel it in, turn it on and start brainstorming.

Time to jam

We want to help teams get back to the heart of what they love to do: create new ideas. That’s why we’ve worked closely with G Suite customers like Instrument, Netflix, and Spotify to refine the blend of hardware and software that drives Jamboard. We're also partnering with BenQ to tap into its network of channels and resellers to help bring Jamboard to market.

While touch displays have traditionally been expensive, at under $6,000 USD, Jamboard is a competitively-priced way to transform your team’s meetings and will be available for purchase in 2017. As we “jam” on the final product details, we're ready to partner with a broader set of G Suite customers to perfect Jamboard through an Early Adopter Program. If you're interested, submit the form on the Jamboard website to receive more information about eligibility.

Source: Drive

Jamboard — the whiteboard, reimagined for collaboration in the cloud

Your team’s collaborative, cloud-first whiteboard

Designed for precision and ease

Time to jam

Source: Drive

Five new ways to reach your goals faster with G Suite

One of the core promises of Google Docs is to help you and your team go from collecting ideas to achieving your goals as quickly and easily as possible. That’s why last month we launched Explore in Docs, Sheets and Slides — with machine intelligence built right in — to help your team create amazing presentations, spreadsheets and documents in a fraction of the time it used to take.

Today, we’re introducing five new time-saving features designed to speed up and simplify the way you work, so you can focus on bringing your team’s ideas to life.

1. Spend less time figuring out who owns what with Action Items

According to research by the McKinsey Global Institute, employees spend about 20 percent of their work week — nearly an entire day — searching for details internally and tracking down colleagues for answers. This can be especially true when a document is full of ideas, requests and comments, making it difficult to get a clear sense of who’s responsible for what.

To help keep your projects moving, when you type phrases like “Ryan to follow up on the keynote script,” or “Andrea to schedule a weekly check in” on desktop, Docs will intelligently suggest an Action Item to assign to the right person, thanks to Natural Language Processing (NLP).

You can also manually assign an Action Item to someone in the Docs, Sheets and Slides desktop and mobile apps by mentioning their name in a comment and checking the new Action Item box. The assignee will get an email notification and see the Action Item(s) clearly highlighted with a blue bar when they open the file.

2. Spend less time searching for the files that need attention

Once Action Items have been assigned, it’s easy for team members to identify documents, spreadsheets and presentations that need their attention. The next time they visit Docs, Sheets, Slides (or Drive) from their laptops or mobile apps, they’ll see a badge on any files with Action Items assigned to them, plus any unresolved suggestions that others have made to their files.

3. Spend less time building questions with smarter Forms

Since its launch in 2008, more than a billion questions have been asked in Forms, allowing us to identify common patterns, like question types and the response options that usually go with them. With the help of neural networks, we can now predict the type of question you’re asking and suggest potential responses for you to choose from, giving you back about 25 percent of the time you used to spend creating a Form.

Let’s say you’re planning an all-day event at the office and need to know which day works best for your team. When you type “What days are you available next week?” Forms will intelligently determine that “Checkbox” is the ideal question type, and generate related response options that you can add one by one or all together.

Also debuting today is a top-requested feature from our business and education customers — the new “File upload” question type. Your respondents can now upload files from their computer or Drive — all of which are neatly collected for you in a new Drive folder. Note: This feature is only available for G Suite customers in Forms shared within their organization.

4. Spend less time typing with a set of new voice commands

Last year, we launched Voice typing in Docs on the web to help you capture ideas, big and small, without lifting a finger. Today, we’re adding more ways to format and customize content with commands for changing text color, deleting words, inserting links and comments, plus a number of other ways to format, hands-free.

5. Spend less time switching between apps to get things done

We want you to be as productive and collaborative as possible, regardless of the tools you choose to work with, so we’ve partnered with Slack to make it even easier to work with Google Docs files.

With a click of the "+" button in Slack, you can bring files from Drive directly into a conversation with your team, or create new Docs, Sheets and Slides files right from Slack. You can check out more details on Slack’s blog.

With the introduction of Explore, and more and more updates to products that build in machine intelligence, taking back time spent on mundane, repetitive tasks will only get easier with G Suite. Now, you can focus your energy on creative and strategic work, not busy work.

Source: Drive

Five new ways to reach your goals faster with G Suite

Today, we’re introducing five new time-saving features designed to speed up and simplify the way you work, so you can focus on bringing your team’s ideas to life.

1. Spend less time figuring out who owns what with Action Items

2. Spend less time searching for the files that need attention

3. Spend less time building questions with smarter Forms

4. Spend less time typing with a set of new voice commands

5. Spend less time switching between apps to get things done

We want you to be as productive and collaborative as possible, regardless of the tools you choose to work with, so we’ve partnered with Slack to make it even easier to work with Google Docs files.

Source: Drive

Save time with Quick Access in Drive

Today, we’re launching Quick Access, which shaves 50 percent off the average time it takes to get to the right file by eliminating the need to search for it. It uses machine learning to intelligently predict the files you need before you’ve even typed anything.

Quick Access predictions are based on an understanding of your Drive activity, as well as your interaction with colleagues and your workday patterns such as recurring team meetings or regular reviews of forecasting spreadsheets.

Starting today, Quick Access will be available globally for G Suite customers on Android. Give it a try, and file away the time you save for more productive activities.

Source: Drive

What you love about Google Search — now for Drive

Innovation is critical for business success, so we're constantly trying to build tools that enable our customers to do more. Starting today, you can use Natural Language Processing (NLP) and other new and improved features in Drive search on web to find files easier and faster. You'll also see a couple of highly-requested Google Docs features that have been added based on your feedback (thank you!).

Search faster and with ease

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a fancy way of saying “search like you talk.” You can type things like “find my budget spreadsheet from last December” or “show me presentations from Anissa.” Drive will understand what you mean and give you the option to click for those specific search results. Drive NLP will get better with each query — so keep on searching. ;)

Get help with speling — er, spelling

When you're trying to find a doc fast, it's easy for typos to slip into your search. Drive now has a new autocorrect feature that suggests corrections to misspelled search terms — which can really help when your brain is moving faster than your fingers.

Enjoy other updates based on your feedback

We’ve also added a few small but mighty features in Google Docs to help you create your best work:

You can now easily split your document into multiple columns in Docs. Just choose “Columns” in the “Format” drop-down menu when you need more formatting options to get your point across.
We know that work happens in all types of file formats. So, when you open, convert and edit non-Google files in Docs, Sheets and Slides, we’ll now save a copy for you. Just view or download the non-Google source file in its original format directly from Revision History in Docs, Sheets and Slides on the web.

These features are available globally and will roll out gradually starting today. As always, tell us know what you think about these new features on Google+ and Twitter. We’re listening.

Posted by Josh Smith, Product Manager, Google Drive

Source: Google Drive Blog

What you love about Google Search — now for Drive

Search faster and with ease

Get help with speling — er, spelling

Enjoy other updates based on your feedback

We’ve also added a few small but mighty features in Google Docs to help you create your best work:

You can now easily split your document into multiple columns in Docs. Just choose “Columns” in the “Format” drop-down menu when you need more formatting options to get your point across.
We know that work happens in all types of file formats. So, when you open, convert and edit non-Google files in Docs, Sheets and Slides, we’ll now save a copy for you. Just view or download the non-Google source file in its original format directly from Revision History in Docs, Sheets and Slides on the web.

These features are available globally and will roll out gradually starting today. As always, tell us know what you think about these new features on Google+ and Twitter. We’re listening.