Tag Archives: G Suite

New ways to comment on Microsoft files (and more) in Google Drive

Google Drive makes it easy to store and share files in the cloud so you can collaborate securely with your teams and clients while on the go. And we understand that teams work with all kinds of files and tools to get things done. Starting today, we're making it possible to comment directly on more file types including Microsoft Office files, PDFs and images—without having to convert them into Docs, Sheets or Slides.

When you're collaborating with an external agency, negotiating a contract with a client or coordinating a sales agreement with a supplier, chances are you're dealing with multiple file formats. With this update, you can now comment on those files in Drive the way you're used to in Google Docs. In the Drive preview pane, comment, assign tasks, or mention coworkers and the people you work can reply back, even if they’re not using G Suite. Let’s say your coworker opens a file on her Windows laptop using MS Word, she will see your comment in the file and can reply right from there.

Bloccos - Image 1 — Provide quick feedback on the most popular file formats, including Word, PowerPoint, Excel and PDF files, in the Drive preview pane.

With commenting in Drive preview, you won’t need to open up other tools to complete tasks. Instead, open Microsoft Office files, like Word, Excel and PowerPoint, in Drive preview and give feedback in comments then get back to work.

AODocs, a company that helps enterprises replace their legacy document management applications and automate business processes integrated with Drive, has been testing the new Drive commenting feature for the past few months. As AODocs helps companies transition from legacy systems, they often collaborate across various licensed software.

“We frequently use the comments feature in Google Docs and Slides when preparing specification documents, reviewing project proposals and creating marketing materials,” says Stéphane Donzé, chief executive officer and founder of AODocs. “With commenting in Drive Preview feature, we can now extend the same collaboration, review and validation processes to Microsoft Office Applications, images and PDFs.”

Bloccos - Image 2 — Collaborate on Excel files—as well as other Microsoft files—all within Google Drive.

The ability to comment in Drive preview mode is just one example of interoperability between G Suite and Microsoft Office products. You can also use a Drive plug-in for Outlook to make it easier to insert files stored in Drive to an Outlook email and save incoming attachments to your Drive from Outlook. Our help center has more specifics on how to enable the plug-in for admins.

Of course, you can also convert Microsoft Office files into Docs, Sheets or Slides. In Google Drive, right click on an Office file and click Open. Then select Docs, Sheets or Slides. Lastly, you can choose to edit Microsoft files without converting them fully using Office Compatibility Mode (OCM).

With G Suite, you can work the way you’re used to working. Get started.

Source: Drive

New ways to comment on Microsoft files (and more) in Google Drive

Of course, you can also convert Microsoft Office files into Docs, Sheets or Slides. Click File > Download as and select the file type you need. Lastly, you can choose to edit Microsoft files without converting them fully using Office Compatibility Mode (OCM).

With G Suite, you can work the way you’re used to working. Get started.

Source: The Official Google Blog

An invitation you’ll want to accept: updates to G Suite meeting room hardware

We’re working closely with customers and industry experts to shape the role of technology in meetings, and we want to make it easy for teams to work together face-to-face, anytime, anywhere. A big part of getting this right is working closely with IT, AV and facilities leaders to understand how we can solve some of their challenges which is why this week, we’re at the Integrated Systems Europe (ISE) conference in Amsterdam to learn from AV and systems integration experts about how we can help them make meetings easier.

Over the past few years, our team has worked diligently to evolve Google Hangouts, create cost-effective, reliable meeting hardware and reimagine how teams brainstorm. Today at ISE, we’re announcing updates to make these meeting solutions even better for enterprises, including:

Expanding Jamboard and Hangouts Meet hardware to new countries
Adding AI-powered autodraw to improve your jams
Offering more Hangouts Meet hardware options for larger rooms

Here's what's new.

Jamboard updates: EU expansion and adding AI-powered AutoDraw

Businesses in North America and the UK are using Jamboard to collaborate, and now teams in Europe can jam together, too. Next month, Jamboard will be available for purchase in eight additional countries: Republic of Ireland, The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, France, Spain and Finland.

Along with expanding Jamboard to new markets, we’re also adding an AI-powered feature called AutoDraw. AutoDraw is a new drawing tool in Jamboard that auto-detects sketches you make and pairs them with images. This gives teams the ability to make their ideas even more visual—whether you’re a creative designer working with clients or even a teacher working with students.

We also recently welcomed the Jamboard app as a core service in G Suite. For everything else Jamboard, check out google.com/jamboard.

Hangouts Meet hardware updates: more options for larger rooms

Fast video meetings are the most effective when they’re available everywhere. Today, we’re also expanding Hangouts Meet hardware—our latest meeting solution—to two additional countries: the Netherlands and Denmark, bringing the total to 14 countries.

Until now, the Hangouts Meet hardware kit has consisted of a touchscreen controller, speakermic, ASUS Chromebox and 4K sensor camera, great for capturing small rooms. While this has made it easy for some businesses to collaborate straight out of the box, we want to ensure the kit is scalable to any room size. So today, we’re adding options for larger rooms:

A new Hangouts Meet room kit that comes with a Logitech PTZ Pro 2 and accommodates up to 20 people. The camera can capture details with 10x optical zoom, and you can pan and tilt to focus on participants.
A standalone Meet speakermic to keep audio quality crisp in bigger rooms. Custom designed and built by Google, the speakermic intelligently reduces echoes and manages background noise. It’s easy to daisy chain up to 5 speakermics together to bring great quality audio to every corner of a room.

To learn more about Hangouts Meet hardware, check out our website.

And if you’re attending ISE, stop by our booth at B200 in Hall 15.

Source: The Official Google Blog

ICYMI in January: here’s what happened in G Suite

We’re teeing off a monthly series to help you keep up with G Suite news. Here’s what happened in January.

We introduced the security center for G Suite

Organizations are constantly dealing with security incidents, but with the right tools, IT professionals can focus more on long-term prevention and less on tactical firefighting. This month, we announced the security center for G Suite to help.

The security center is a central place for IT administrators to see important security analytics, like usage, as well as insights to help them take action quicker, like if files are shared externally. It also shares best practices from Google on how to improve cyber-safety. G Suite enterprise customers can access a bird’s eye view of their organization’s security all from within the Admin console. Get started.

While we’re on the topic of security, enabling and encouraging second-factor (2SV) authentication can help protect your accounts if passwords are compromised. Learn how to easily enable 2SV and enforce its use across your organization.

Looking for more security tips? Here’s some guidance to help secure company information in the Admin console and these tips are handy for preventing phishing attempts.

→ Jamboard is a core service within G Suite. Welcome to the family!

→ Now you can use Hangouts Meet on Android and iOS tablets, and dial in from nine new countries: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, Norway, Romania, Switzerland and Turkey. This brings the total to 24 countries where Meet is available, with more to come. Learn more.

→ We’ve made it easier to search for information within a specific folder in Google Drive. Now you can right click on a folder title in your Drive and select “Search within [title of folder].” Type terms into the search bar and track down your files faster. Here are some more tricks to help you save time searching.

→ Everyone should have a “say” in team collaboration, which is why we’re continuously improving our products to be more accessible. This month, we’ve added Braille support in Sheets and a way to magnify your screen in Slides. Check out a full list of accessibility features.

Until next time.

Source: Google Cloud

ICYMI in January: here’s what happened in G Suite

We’re teeing off a monthly series to help you keep up with G Suite news. Here’s what happened in January.

We introduced the security center for G Suite

Looking for more security tips? Here’s some guidance to help secure company information in the Admin console and these tips are handy for preventing phishing attempts.

→ Jamboard is a core service within G Suite. Welcome to the family!

Until next time.

Source: Google Cloud

An easy formula: 5 reasons to use Google Sheets

Import, export, email. Do it again. When it comes to data analysis, it’s easy to fall into routine. But no matter how much of a whiz you are at formulas or pivot tables, superb spreadsheet skills only take you so far if you’re working with multiple versions or outdated datasets.

On average, employees spend up to eight hours each week—an entire work day—searching for and consolidating information. What if businesses spent their time applying data insights instead of tracking them down?

We designed cloud-based tools, like Google Sheets, to make it easier to quickly organize and analyze information in one place. Here are five reasons why you should try using Sheets.

1. Your data always stays up to date.

Working in the cloud means your data can easily stay up to date because information is automatically saved as it’s typed. Multiple team members can collaborate in real-time from their phone, tablet or computer (online and offline) and create a single source of truth for projects, like quarterly budgets.

Need personalization? No problem. You can look at the same data as your coworkers without disrupting their view, sort information to be in a specific order or hide sheets that you don’t need to see. If you’re worried about others mucking up your data, you can protect cells by setting custom share settings. Plus, you don’t have to worry about version control. You can see changes or revert to previous versions in File > Version History or by clicking on “All Changes Saved in Drive” at the top of your Sheet.

2. You can use Google’s artificial intelligence to speed up analysis.

Powered by Google’s machine intelligence, Sheets does a lot of the heavy lifting for you when it comes to data analysis. You can ask a question about your data and Sheets will return an answer using natural language processing. Sheets also builds charts, suggests formulas and creates pivot tables for you.

Data gurus who want to take analysis a step further can sync Sheets to BigQuery to analyze information against large data sets. Check out this example or this example.

3. You can help keep your data secure.

We built security features across G Suite to help you manage your most sensitive business information. Sheets is no exception.

Clicking “Share” in the upper righthand corner of your Sheet determines access settings for individual team members, so you stay in control of who can view, edit or comment on your documents. Additional IRM (Information Rights Management) controls allow you to easily disable options to download, copy or print spreadsheets, and you can set expiration dates if you need to suspend access to confidential information. Admins also have the power to restrict file sharing within an organization or to whitelist domains.

4. You can work the way you’re used to working.

We get it—you need tools that won’t interrupt work processes (especially if you’ve used those processes forever). That’s why we’ve baked in functionality that teams are used to using.

Let’s start with functions. You can use hundreds of functions that you’re used to working with, like VLOOKUP, SUMIFS and IPMT. We’ve also created unique-to-Sheets functions to help you crunch numbers in new ways, like: FILTER to quickly organize a spreadsheet according to an input, QUERY to pull specific results out of a central dataset or GOOGLEFINANCE to source data directly from Google Finance. Outside of functions, can also create pivot tables to analyze your data (or let Sheets do it for you.).
What about organization? Color cells using Conditional Formatting, create drop-down lists with Data Validation or freeze headers at the top of your sheet, to make your data presentation-friendly. Once your data is organized, you can visualize it in pie charts, bar charts, line charts—charts galore.
Editing on the fly. Sheets is available online and offline—and on desktop web browsers, and Android and iOS apps—which means your teams don’t have to stop working during business travel or when Wi-Fi is down.

5. You can automate processes.

When information is in one place, it’s easier to automate processes. Let’s say you need to order supplies for your office. Instead of emailing back-and-forth to coordinate purchases you can use G Suite apps instead.

For example, say you’re an inventory manager at a retail company and you gather supply requests from your teams using Google Forms. You can import the Form responses into a Sheet to keep a record of needs. If your Sheet is synced to Gmail with a script, it can send emails to relevant parties about requests automatically, so they can see and approve requests in one spot—the Sheet. Poof! No more unnecessary email clutter.

There are a ton of ways you can automate mundane tasks or speed up workflows. Check out how The New York Times used the Sheets API to report congressional votes quickly.

Let data drive your business decisions. Learn how you can access insights using Sheets or visit the G Suite Learning Center for specific product tips.

Source: The Official Google Blog

Tools for every school: G Suite for Education updates

Editor's note:This week our Google for Education team will be joining thousands of educators at the BETT educational technology conference in London. Follow along on The Keyword and Twitter for the latest news and updates.

Education is evolving, and G Suite for Education is too. Today, we’re announcing two exciting updates: a new set of free features designed to strengthen security for all G Suite for Education users, as well as a new edition called G Suite Enterprise for Education. The tools in this new edition offer large educational institutions some of the same capabilities used by enterprises to meet their more complex technology needs.

New security features coming to G Suite for Education

These new features will bring valuable security tools to the 80 million teachers and students who rely on G Suite for Education, at no additional cost:

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for Drive and Gmail gives admins greater control and visibility in protecting their sensitive school data, and the ability to protect users from accidentally sharing confidential information externally. G Suite’s DLP protections include a library of predefined content detections to make setup easy and advanced capabilities such as OCR recognition of content stored in images.
Security key management and enforcement offers an additional layer of security for user accounts by requiring a physical key. Admins can now require their institution to log in using security keys to further secure the organization against phishing attacks. Security Keys plug directly into a laptop or pair with a mobile device using Bluetooth or NFC, instead of receiving a code via text. Admins will also be able to manage the deployment of Security Keys and view usage reports, keeping data security all in one place.
Hosted Gmail S/MIMEgives institutions working with sensitive information an option to digitally sign and encrypt emails. It’s easy to manage for administrators and seamless for end users. It also adds verifiable account-level signatures authentication to better protect against email spoofing. And with Hosted S/MIME, incoming encrypted mail still benefits from Gmail’s extensive protections against spam/phishing/malware.

Meet G Suite Enterprise for Education

We’ve heard from dozens of large institutions—from private and public colleges and universities, to school districts across the country— that they want access to more advanced tools to meet their technology needs. Whether it’s advanced data and device controls or enterprise-grade communication capabilities, we are excited to be offering an entirely new solution for these customers. G Suite Enterprise for Education will offer many of the same capabilities available to G Suite business customers in addition to future features geared towards the specific needs of educational institutions.

Here’s a closer look at the capabilities available in G Suite Enterprise for Education. Over time, we expect to add more tools that are geared towards the needs of larger institutions:

Advanced mobile device managementhelps large organizations enable proactive management of mobile BYOD devices. With new device rules for Mobile Management, G Suite admins can now define custom rules that trigger on device events, like device updates or ownership changes, and have associated actions. Additionally, admins can review audits and reports of activities on these devices, as well as securely managework apps on a user’s device while leaving personal apps under the user’s control.
Cloud Searchprovides a unified search experience across G Suite, helping users spend less time searching for information and more time deriving insights. Powered by machine intelligence, Cloud Search surfaces personalized information that helps users stay on top of important work, prepare for upcoming meetings or even suggest files that need attention.
Gmail logs analysis in BigQuerycontain information that can help education administrators diagnose issues or unlock insights. Admins will be able to run sophisticated, high-performing custom queries and build custom dashboards. With Admin reports in BigQuery, they can also analyze their domains’ data to understand product adoption and usage.
Security center for G Suite brings together security analytics, actionable insights and best practice recommendations from Google so that admins can protect their organization, data and users. Admins now have access to a unified security dashboard and can reduce risk to their organization by adopting security health recommendations from Google.
Record meetings and save them to Drive.For schools wanting to capture faculty meetings or online lectures, Hangouts Meet can be used to record them and save them directly to Drive making them readily accessible for those that weren’t able to attend.
Hangouts Meet supports up to 50 participants. The ability to bring together people across large districts or remote campuses saves time. With this edition, teams can connect up to fifty participants on a single video and phone conference.
The dial-in feature in Meetallows users to seamlessly connect to meetings via a phone. Whether working from their mobile device or if they don’t have a reliable Wi-Fi connection, users can join via a conferencing bridge that’s automatically added to every meeting. Additionally, it’s now available in more than two dozen countries, making it easy for educators to connect if their institution has a footprint around the globe.

Clay County, which has been piloting G Suite Enterprise for Education, is spread out over 601 square miles in northeastern Florida. According to Jeremy Bunkley, Director of Information Technology, “G Suite Enterprise for Education has improved our ability to address critical IT needs that stem from being a large district. The advanced tools in Hangouts Meet have allowed us to reduce costs and save time."

G Suite Enterprise for Education will be a paid product for schools and you can learn more about the affordable pricing on our Help Center. This will not affect the pricing for G Suite for Education, which will remain free to schools. We’ll continue to add new features to G Suite for Education at no additional cost, starting with the added security features we announced today. Below is a quick snapshot of the features included in each edition:

We’ve been working with colleges and school districts to pilot both the new free features and enterprise tools, and we’ll be making them widely available in the coming months. Submit this form if you’re interested in getting more information about G Suite Enterprise for Education. You can learn more about the edition on our website and Help Center.

Source: Google Cloud

Introducing the security center for G Suite—security analytics and best practices from Google

We want to make it easy for you to manage your organization’s data security. A big part of this is making sure you and your admins can access a bird’s eye view of your security—and, more importantly, that you can take action based on timely insights.

Today, we’re introducing the security center for G Suite, a tool that brings together security analytics, actionable insights and best practice recommendations from Google to empower you to protect your organization, data and users.

With the security center, key executives and admins can do things like:

1. See a snapshot of important security metrics in one place.

Get insights into suspicious device activity, visibility into how spam and malware are targeting users within your organization and metrics to demonstrate security effectiveness—all in a unified dashboard.

2. Stay ahead of potential threats.

Admins can now examine security analytics to flag threats. For example, your team can have visibility into which users are being targeted by phishing so that you can head off potential attacks, or when Google Drive files trigger DLP rules, you have a heads up to avoid risking data exfiltration.

3. Reduce risk by adopting security health recommendations.

Security health analyzes your existing security posture and gives you customized advice to secure your users and data. These recommendations cover issues ranging from how your data is stored, to how your files are shared, as well as recommendations on mobility and communications settings.

Get started

More than 3.5 million organizations rely on G Suite to collaborate securely. If you’re a G Suite Enterprise customer, you’ll be able to access the security center within the Admin console automatically in the next few days. These instructions can help admins get started and here are some security best practices to keep in mind.

If you’re new to G Suite, learn more about about how you can collaborate, store and communicate securely.

Source: Google Cloud

Introducing the security center for G Suite—security analytics and best practices from Google

With the security center, key executives and admins can do things like:

1. See a snapshot of important security metrics in one place.

2. Stay ahead of potential threats.

3. Reduce risk by adopting security health recommendations.

Get started

If you’re new to G Suite, learn more about about how you can collaborate, store and communicate securely.

Source: The Official Google Blog

Expanding our global infrastructure with new regions and subsea cables

At Google, we've spent $30 billion improving our infrastructure over three years, and we’re not done yet. From data centers to subsea cables, Google is committed to connecting the world and serving our Cloud customers, and today we’re excited to announce that we’re adding three new submarine cables, and five new regions.

We’ll open our Netherlands and Montreal regions in the first quarter of 2018, followed by Los Angeles, Finland, and Hong Kong – with more to come. Then, in 2019 we’ll commission three subsea cables: Curie, a private cable connecting Chile to Los Angeles; Havfrue, a consortium cable connecting the U.S. to Denmark and Ireland; and the Hong Kong-Guam Cable system (HK-G), a consortium cable interconnecting major subsea communication hubs in Asia.

Together, these investments further improve our network—the world’s largest—which by some accounts delivers 25% of worldwide internet traffic. Companies like PayPal leverage our network and infrastructure to run their businesses effectively.

“At PayPal, we process billions of transactions across the globe, and need to do so securely, instantaneously and economically. As a result, security, networking and infrastructure were key considerations for us when choosing a cloud provider,” said Sri Shivananda, PayPal’s Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. “With Google Cloud, we have access to the world’s largest network, which helps us reach our infrastructure goals and best serve our millions of users.”

infrastructure-1 — Figure 1. Diagram shows existing GCP regions and upcoming GCP regions

infrastructure-2 — Figure 2. Diagram shows three new subsea cable investments, expanding capacity to Chile, Asia Pacific and across the Atlantic

Curie cable

Our investment in the Curie cable (named after renowned scientist Marie Curie) is part of our ongoing commitment to improve global infrastructure. In 2008, we were the first tech company to invest in a subsea cable as a part of a consortium. With Curie, we become the first major non-telecom company to build a private intercontinental cable.

By deploying our own private subsea cable, we help improve global connectivity while providing value to our customers. Owning the cable ourselves has some distinct benefits. Since we control the design and construction process, we can fully define the cable’s technical specifications, streamline deployment and deliver service to users and customers faster. Also, once the cable is deployed, we can make routing decisions that optimize for latency and availability.

Curie will be the first subsea cable to land in Chile in almost 20 years. Once deployed, Curie will be Chile’s largest single data pipe. It will serve Google users and customers across Latin America.

Havfrue cable

To increase capacity and resiliency in our North Atlantic systems, we’re working with Facebook, Aqua Comms and Bulk Infrastructure to build a direct submarine cable system connecting the U.S. to Denmark and Ireland. This cable, called Havfrue (Danish for “mermaid”), will be built by TE SubCom and is expected to come online by the end of 2019. The marine route survey, during which the supplier determines the specific route the cable will take, is already underway.

HK-G cable

In the Pacific, we’re working with RTI-C and NEC on the Hong Kong-Guam cable system. Together with Indigo and other existing subsea systems, this cable creates multiple scalable, diverse paths to Australia, increasing our resilience in the Pacific. As a result, customers will experience improved capacity and latency from Australia to major hubs in Asia. It will also increase our network capacity at our new Hong Kong region.

infrastructure-3 — Figure 3. A complete list of Google’s subsea cable investments. New cables in this announcement are highlighted yellow. Google subsea cables provide reliability, speed and security not available from any other cloud.

Google has direct investment in 11 cables, including those planned or under construction. The three cables highlighted in yellow are being announced in this blog post. (In addition to these 11 cables where Google has direct ownership, we also lease capacity on numerous additional submarine cables.)

What does this mean for our customers?

These new investments expand our existing cloud network. The Google network has over 100 points of presence (map) and over 7,500 edge caching nodes (map). This investment means faster and more reliable connectivity for all our users.

Simply put, it wouldn’t be possible to deliver products like Machine Learning Engine, Spanner, BigQuery and other Google Cloud Platform and G Suite services at the quality of service users expect without the Google network. Our cable systems provide the speed, capacity and reliability Google is known for worldwide, and at Google Cloud, our customers are able to to make use of the same network infrastructure that powers Google’s own services.

While we haven’t hastened the speed of light, we have built a superior cloud network as a result of the well-provisioned direct paths between our cloud and end-users, as shown in the figure below.

infrastructure-4 — Figure 4. The Google network offers better reliability, speed and security performance as compared with the nondeterministic performance of the public internet, or other cloud networks. The Google network consists of fiber optic links and subsea cables between 100+ points of presence, 7500+ edge node locations, 90+ Cloud CDN locations, 47 dedicated interconnect locations and 15 GCP regions.

We’re excited about these improvements. We're increasing our commitment to ensure users have the best connections in this increasingly connected world.