Available now in beta through our Developer Preview Program, you can read working location data using the Calendar API and get notified when those working locations change. Previously, we said this functionality would be available through a separate API. However, in order to provide a more streamlined experience, this functionality will be instead available in the Calendar API.
Using the API to read a Calendar user’s working location values can help you:
Analyze the flow and volume of people through physical campuses, helping you adapt on-site resources to the needs of your employees.
Share whereabouts across other internal or third-party surfaces, making it easier to enable tasks such as hot desk booking or schedule in-office or remote working days.
We anticipate write support for the API to become available in Q3 2023 — we’ll share an update here on the Workspace Updates Blog at that time.
While all developers will be able to use the API, the working location feature is only available for eligible Workspace editions:
Available to Google Workspace Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Education Fundamentals, Education Plus, Education Standard, the Teaching and Learning Upgrade and Nonprofits customers, as well as legacy G Suite Business customers
Not available to Google Workspace Essentials, Business Starter, Enterprise Essentials, Frontline, G Suite Basic customers
We’re improving the client-side security of Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, Sites, Jamboard, Drawings, and Drive with Trusted Types. This will provide an extra layer of protection around Document Object Model (DOM) APIs that are used by the apps listed above or third-party extensions.
This new enforcement mode will require third-party extensions to use typed objects instead of strings when assigning values to DOM APIs, and will begin rolling out on March 23, 2023. Once Trusted Types are fully enforced, the Trusted Types directive will be present in the Content Security Policy (CSP) header:
Who’s impacted
Developers (relying on any Chrome extensions that modify DOM APIs.)
Why it’s important
Trusted Types is a feature that further enhances our advanced data protection controls to keep users and data safe across more of the apps they use everyday.
Additional details
Screen readers, braille devices, and screen magnification will not change with Trusted Types. However, we recommend admins and developers check third party extensions for Trusted Types violations. Visit the Help Center to learn more about Accessibility for Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, & Drawings.
Getting started
Admins: There is no admin control for this feature.
Developers:
To make code Trusted Types compliant, signal to the browser that data being used within the context of these DOM APIs is trustworthy by creating a Trusted Type special object.
There are several ways to be Trusted Types compliant, such as removing the offending code, using a library, or creating a Trusted Types policy. To ensure a seamless experience for users, these techniques can be employed before Trusted Types enforcement is rolled out.
Within the Google Cloud Console, you can now view and manage all Google Workspace API activity. Here, you’ll find a centralized view of which APIs are currently running and their associated requests. You can also easily perform common actions such as:
Monitoring aggregated metrics for APIs, including traffic, errors, and latency.
Viewing and adjusting quotas as needed.
Managing API credentials.
Finding other available APIs, tutorials and documentation.
This unified experience will eliminate the need to search for APIs manually, making it easier to manage your existing projects and build out your API ecosystem with new integrations.
Getting started
Admins and Developers: From the navigation menu in the Google Cloud console, navigate to View all products > Other Google Products > Google Workspace. Visit the Help Center to learn more about enhancing Google Workspace Apps.
It’s now easier to configure and use Cloud Search search filters and facets with multiple enhancements to our existing functionalities. With this launch, you can use the Cloud Search Query API to configure new additional capabilities:
Faceting support for integer type fields, such as priority levels for support tickets or the number of pages in a document
Out of the box Faceting support for document size, document creation, and custom date fields
New default reserved operators for document size and created date fields
Simplified Query API response with filters being directly provided in the response
Expanding filter options creates a more user friendly search experience, making it easier and faster to narrow search results to the most relevant documents.
Getting started
Admins and developers: See our developer documentation for more information about using new facet enhancements
End users: There is no end user action required. You will automatically see new filter options once your admin has configured them
AppSheet is Google’s platform for building and deploying end-to-end apps and automation without writing code. As we continue to enhance and streamline app creation, we’re introducing a built-in structured database in public preview.
Within the database editor, you can set the same column types as in the AppSheet editor for your data.
Easily create and customize databases starting from AppSheet's My Apps page.
Who’s impacted
Admins, developers and end users
Why it’s important
AppSheet databases make it easy for you to organize and manage the data that power your apps directly inside AppSheet. See our Developer Blog for more information.
Additional Details
Note that during preview:
Access to AppSheet databases will be enabled by default for everyone. There will be no impact on existing apps. Users can connect a database to both new and existing AppSheet apps.
Databases will be limited to 10k rows per table, 20 tables per database and 20 databases per user. These limits may change when this feature becomes generally available.
Getting started
Admins and Developers: You can create a blank database from the My Apps page.
Visit the AppSheet Help Center for more information on AppSheet databases.
A medical game for doctors, a language game for kids, a scary game for horror lovers and an escape room game for thrill seekers! In this latest batch of #WeArePlay stories, we’re celebrating the founders behind a wonderful variety of games from all over the world. Have a read and get gaming!
To start, let’s meet Sam from Chicago. Coming from a family of doctors, his Dad challenged him to make a game to help those in the medical field. Sam agreed, made a game and months later discovered over 100,000 doctors were able to practice medical procedures. This early success inspired him to found Level Ex - a company of 135, making world-class medical games for doctors across the globe. Despite his achievements, his Dad still hopes Sam may one day get into medicine himself and clinch a Nobel prize.
Next, a few more stories from around the world:
Aldo and Sandro from Peru - founders of Dark Dome. They combine storytelling and art to make thrilling and chilling games, filled with plot twists and jump scares.
Vladimir, Tomislav and Boris from Croatia - founders of Pine Studio. They won the Indie Games Festival 2021 with their game Cats In Time.
Kelly, Mikk, Reimo and Madde from Estonia - founders of ALPA kids. Their language games for children have a huge impact on early education and language preservation.
Check out all the stories now at g.co/play/weareplay and stay tuned for even more coming soon.
Coming soon to beta, the Calendar User Availability API will be used to programmatically access the working location feature in Google Calendar. You can gain access to the beta through the Google Workspace Developer Preview Program.
You can preview the API documentation now to prepare in advance and share your initial feedback as we move closer to beta.
Who’s impacted
Admins and developers
Why you’d use it
The working location feature is an easy way for users to share where they’ll be working for any given day or period of time. Up until now, only end users could create these calendar entries. Now, this information can be read and written using an API to manage and accommodate the needs of your employees.
Customers rely on other applications to set their location context, such as booking a desk with hot desk booking tools or requesting and setting “work from home” days in HR management tools. This creates duplicative work for end users. With the API, a user’s working location can be programmatically set or accessed directly from the user’s calendar to any other third-party application.
Additionally, by surfacing working location context into other systems and tools like internal team directories, customers can optimize the flow of people in their physical office locations. Or you can use the API to prepare for the demand of dining services, conference rooms, and more, based on this data.
End users: Visit the Help Center to learn more about working location in Google Calendar.
Availability
While all developers will be able to use the API, apps created using the API are only accessible to those on eligible Workspace editions:
Available to Google Workspace Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Education Fundamentals, Education Plus, Education Standard, the Teaching and Learning Upgrade and Nonprofits customers, as well as legacy G Suite Business customers
Not available to Google Workspace Essentials, Business Starter, Enterprise Essentials, Frontline, G Suite Basic customers
A medical game for doctors, a language game for kids, a scary game for horror lovers and an escape room game for thrill seekers! In this latest batch of #WeArePlay stories, we’re celebrating the founders behind a wonderful variety of games from all over the world. Have a read and get gaming!
To start, let’s meet Sam from Chicago. Coming from a family of doctors, his Dad challenged him to make a game to help those in the medical field. Sam agreed, made a game and months later discovered over 100,000 doctors were able to practice medical procedures. This early success inspired him to found Level Ex - a company of 135, making world-class medical games for doctors across the globe. Despite his achievements, his Dad still hopes Sam may one day get into medicine himself and clinch a Nobel prize.
Next, a few more stories from around the world:
Aldo and Sandro from Peru - founders of Dark Dome. They combine storytelling and art to make thrilling and chilling games, filled with plot twists and jump scares.
Vladimir, Tomislav and Boris from Croatia - founders of Pine Studio. They won the Indie Games Festival 2021 with their game Cats In Time.
Kelly, Mikk, Reimo and Madde from Estonia - founders of ALPA kids. Their language games for children have a huge impact on early education and language preservation.
Check out all the stories now at g.co/play/weareplay and stay tuned for even more coming soon.
In our ongoing Serverless Migration Station mini-series aimed at helping developers modernize their serverless applications, one of the key objectives for Google App Engine developers is to upgrade to the latest language runtimes, such as from Python 2 to 3 or Java 8 to 17. Another goal is to demonstrate how to move away from App Engine legacy APIs (now referred to as "bundled services") to Cloud standalone replacement services. Once this has been accomplished, apps are much more portable, making them flexible enough to:
Shift across to other serverless platforms, like Cloud Functions or Cloud Run (with or without Docker), or
Move to VM-based services like GKE or Compute Engine, or to other compute platforms
Developers building web apps that provide for user uploads or serve large files like videos or audio clips can benefit from convenient "blob" storage backing such functionality, and App Engine's Blobstore serves this specific purpose. As mentioned above, moving away from proprietary App Engine services like Blobstore makes user apps more portable. The original underlying Blobstore infrastructure eventually merged with the Cloud Storage service anyway, so it's logical to move completely to Cloud Storage when convenient, and this content is inform on this process.
Showing App Engine users how to use its Blobstore service
In today's Module 15 video, we begin this journey by showing users how to add Blobstore usage to a sample app, setting us up for our next move to Cloud Storage in Module 16. Similar videos in this series adding use of an App Engine bundled service start with a Python 2 sample app that has already migrated web frameworks from webapp2 to Flask, but not this time.
Blobstore for Python 2 has a dependency on webapp, the original App Engine micro framework replaced by webapp2 when the Python 2.5 runtime was deprecated in favor of 2.7. Because the Blobstore handlers were left "stuck" in webapp, it's better to start with a more generic webapp2 app prior to a Flask migration. This isn't an issue because we modernize this app completely in Module 16 by:
Migrating from webapp2 (and webapp) to Flask
Migrating from App Engine NDB to Cloud NDB
Migrating from App Engine Blobstore to Cloud Storage
Migrating from Python 2 to Python (2 and) 3
We'll go into more detail in Module 16, but it suffices to say that once those migrations are complete, the resulting app becomes portable enough for all the possibilities mentioned at the top.
Adding use of Blobstore
The original sample app registers individual web page "visits," storing visitor information such as the IP address and user agent, then displaying the most recent visits to the end-user. In today's video, we add one additional feature: allowing visitors to optionally augment their visits with a file artifact, like an image. Instead of registering a visit immediately, the visitor is first prompted to provide the artifact, as illustrated below.
The updated sample app's new artifact prompt page
The end-user can choose to do so or click a "Skip" button to opt-out. Once this process is complete, the same most recent visits page is then rendered, with one difference: an additional link to view a visit artifact if one's available.
The sample app's updated most recent visits page
Below is pseudocode representing the core part of the app that was altered to add Blobstore usage, namely new upload and download handlers as well as the changes required of the main handler. Upon the initial GET request, the artifact form is presented. When the user submits an artifact or skips, the upload handler POSTs back to home ("/") via an HTTP 307 to preserve the verb, and then the most recent visits page is rendered as expected. There, if the end-user wishes to view a visit artifact, they can click a "view" link where the download handler which fetches and returns the corresponding artifact from the Blobstore service, otherwise an HTTP 404 if the artifact wasn't found. The bolded lines represent the new or altered code.
Adding App Engine Blobstore usage to sample app
Wrap-up
In this "migration," we added Blobstore usage to support visit artifacts to the Module 0 baseline sample app and arrived at the finish line with the Module 15 sample app. To get hands-on experience doing it yourself, do the codelab by hand and follow along with the video. Then you'll be ready to upgrade to Cloud Storage should you choose to do so.
If you do want to move to Cloud Storage, Module 16 is next. You can also try its codelab to get a head start. All Serverless Migration Station content (codelabs, videos, source code [when available]) can be accessed at its open source repo. While our content initially focuses on Python users, the Cloud team is working on covering other language runtimes, so stay tuned. For additional video content, check out our broader Serverless Expeditions series.
We’re introducing Suggest Filters for Cloud Search. Using the Cloud Search Query API, admins can specify a filter condition that will be pre-applied to keyword suggestions as user types a query. This will surface more relevant suggestions, helping reduce the time users spend searching.
Who’s impacted
Admins, developers and end users
Why it’s important
With suggestion filters, admins can configure suggestions based on the use cases for a given search application, reducing irrelevant suggestions. For example, admins can add a suggestion such as a country, which will surface suggestions based on documents that align the filters.
Getting started
Admins: See our developer documentation here and here for more information about creating a suggestion filter.
End users: There is no end user action required, you will automatically see relevant suggested filters as you type a query.
