Tag Archives: G Suite

G Suite and Freshdesk at your (customer) service

Managing teams and customer requests across geographies and disciplines can be a challenge, but cloud-based applications like Freshdesk can make it much easier. What’s great about Freshdesk is that it’s a popular customer support and IT helpdesk solution—and, better yet, it integrates with G Suite.

Together, G Suite and Freshdesk help companies manage many customer interactions in one place which helps businesses collaborate and address customer concerns quicker. Win-win. Integrate your favorite Google and G Suite tools like Gmail, Hangouts, Google Drive, Analytics and more, directly into Freshdesk. Check it out.

How Citizens Advice uses G Suite and Freshdesk

Citizens Advice is a network of nearly 300 independent charities in England and Wales. The organization provides free consultation on issues like housing, immigration, and consumer rights, and employs 30,000 staff across 2,700 locations. More than three-quarters of the staff are trained volunteers who work remotely. With so many inquiries per year, it’s imperative that Citizens Advice has the tools to collaborate, analyze and improve customer experience, particularly when bringing together so many independent partners. Plus, the organization requires a solution that can integrate directly with existing IT infrastructure.

Citizens Advice chose G Suite and Freshdesk to help with this. Says Simon Sheridan, product manager at Citizens Advice, “G Suite and Freshdesk help our teams collaborate and create more value for our customers every day.” The organization uses both tools to:

Collaborate with distributed teams. G Suite apps like Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Calendar help Citizens Advice organize customer support processes, and to collaborate across distributed teams, including its large network of volunteers.
Create better support functions for customers. The company uses integrations with G Suite and Freshdesk to mitigate customer support issues quicker. For example, Citizens Advice uses Hangouts to resolve customer issues face-to-face.
Analyze and optimize the customer support process. With tools like Freshdesk and Freshservice by Freshworks, Citizens Advice is able to analyze and improve the customer support process. The company also monitors and reports on each stage of the customer journey using G Suite tools.

Learn more about how your business can use G Suite and Freshdesk to deliver better customer experiences. Sign up for this webinar on Thursday, November 9, 2017 at 2pm GMT if you’re in Europe, or at 11am PT / 2pm ET if you’re in North America.

Source: Google Cloud

Gmail Add-ons framework now available to all developers

Originally posted by Wesley Chun, G Suite Developer Advocate on the G Suite Blog

Email remains at the heart of how companies operate. That's why earlier this year, we previewed Gmail Add-ons—a way to help businesses speed up workflows. Since then, we've seen partners build awesome applications, and beginning today, we're extending the Gmail add-on preview to include all developers. Now anyone can start building a Gmail add-on.

Gmail Add-ons let you integrate your app into Gmail and extend Gmail to handle quick actions.

They are built using native UI context cards that can include simple text dialogs, images, links, buttons and forms. The add-on appears when relevant, and the user is just a click away from your app's rich and integrated functionality.

Gmail Add-ons are easy to create. You only have to write code once for your add-on to work on both web and mobile, and you can choose from a rich palette of widgets to craft a custom UI. Create an add-on that contextually surfaces cards based on the content of a message. Check out this video to see how we created an add-on to collate email receipts and expedite expense reporting.

Per the video, you can see that there are three components to the app's core functionality. The first component is getContextualAddOn()—this is the entry point for all Gmail Add-ons where data is compiled to build the card and render it within the Gmail UI. Since the add-on is processing expense reports from email receipts in your inbox, the createExpensesCard()parses the relevant data from the message and presents them in a form so your users can confirm or update values before submitting. Finally, submitForm()takes the data and writes a new row in an "expenses" spreadsheet in Google Sheets, which you can edit and tweak, and submit for approval to your boss.

Check out the documentation to get started with Gmail Add-ons, or if you want to see what it's like to build an add-on, go to the codelab to build ExpenseItstep-by-step. While you can't publish your add-on just yet, you can fill out this form to get notified when publishing is opened. We can't wait to see what Gmail Add-ons you build!

Source: Google Developers Blog

Do more from your inbox with Gmail Add-ons

For many of us, email is mission control—the prompt to generate an invoice, prepare a presentation or follow up on a sales opportunity. With so many to-dos, imagine if you could complete these tasks directly from your inbox without interrupting your workflow.

We believe email can do more, which is why we’re launching Gmail Add-ons, a new way to work with your favorite business apps directly in Gmail.

Gmail Add-ons, built for your workflows

Rather than toggling between your inbox and other apps, use add-ons to complete actions right from Gmail. With Gmail Add-ons, your inbox can contextually surface your go-to app based on messages you receive to help you get things done faster. And because add-ons work the same across web and Android, you only need to install them once to access them on all of your devices. Click the settings wheel on the top right of your inbox and then “Get add-ons” to get started.

We made Gmail Add-ons available in developer preview earlier this year, and since then, our partners have built integrations to help businesses connect with customers, track projects, facilitate invoicing and more. Here’s a list of partners that have built Gmail Add-ons you can install today:

Asana: Turn communication with clients, customers and teammates into tasks that can be tracked with your team in Asana, all from your inbox.

Dialpad: Message or call colleagues on your device, any time. Automatically view recent communications or save a new contact straight from Gmail.
DocuSign (coming soon): Sign and execute contracts, agreements and other documents directly in Gmail using the DocuSign add-on.
Hire: Add candidates, manage candidate information and upload resumes without leaving Gmail. You can access full job applications from the Hire add-on.
Intuit QuickBooks Invoicing: Create and send professional invoices directly in Gmail. Let customers pay you online and track invoice status and payments no matter where you are.

ProsperWorks: Easily access prospect or customer data, and log activities from calls, demos and meetings. You can also scan related opportunities, tasks and events.

RingCentral: See the online/offline status of RingCentral contacts, review recent call history, make outbound calls (requires RingCentral for Mobile) and view and send SMS messages.
Smartsheet: Add email content and desired attachments directly to Smartsheet without leaving Gmail.
Streak: Add email threads to deals, view enriched contact info and quickly respond with snippets directly from Gmail with the Streak add-on.
Trello: Turn email into actionable tasks in Trello to give your team a shared perspective on the work that needs to be done.

Wrike: Create Wrike tasks from emails, view and update task details, and send and receive Wrike task comments.

If you're a developer, you can also easily create add-ons for your app or your organization—write your add-on code once and it will run natively in Gmail on web and Android right away. Learn more.

Try Gmail Add-ons today

Knock out action items the minute they hit your inbox. G Suite and Gmail users can check out the G Suite Marketplace to find and install Gmail Add-ons.

Source: Google Cloud

Do more from your inbox with Gmail Add-ons

We believe email can do more, which is why we’re launching Gmail Add-ons, a new way to work with your favorite business apps directly in Gmail.

Gmail Add-ons, built for your workflows

Asana: Turn communication with clients, customers and teammates into tasks that can be tracked with your team in Asana, all from your inbox.

Dialpad: Message or call colleagues on your device, any time. Automatically view recent communications or save a new contact straight from Gmail.
DocuSign (coming soon): Sign and execute contracts, agreements and other documents directly in Gmail using the DocuSign add-on.
Hire: Add candidates, manage candidate information and upload resumes without leaving Gmail. You can access full job applications from the Hire add-on.
Intuit QuickBooks Invoicing: Create and send professional invoices directly in Gmail. Let customers pay you online and track invoice status and payments no matter where you are.

ProsperWorks: Easily access prospect or customer data, and log activities from calls, demos and meetings. You can also scan related opportunities, tasks and events.

RingCentral: See the online/offline status of RingCentral contacts, review recent call history, make outbound calls (requires RingCentral for Mobile) and view and send SMS messages.
Smartsheet: Add email content and desired attachments directly to Smartsheet without leaving Gmail.
Streak: Add email threads to deals, view enriched contact info and quickly respond with snippets directly from Gmail with the Streak add-on.
Trello: Turn email into actionable tasks in Trello to give your team a shared perspective on the work that needs to be done.

Wrike: Create Wrike tasks from emails, view and update task details, and send and receive Wrike task comments.

If you're a developer, you can also easily create add-ons for your app or your organization—write your add-on code once and it will run natively in Gmail on web and Android right away. Learn more.

Try Gmail Add-ons today

Knock out action items the minute they hit your inbox. G Suite and Gmail users can check out the G Suite Marketplace to find and install Gmail Add-ons.

Source: Gmail Blog

Gmail add-ons framework now available to all developers

Posted by Wesley Chun (@wescpy), Developer Advocate, G Suite

Email remains at the heart of how companies operate. That’s why earlier this year, we previewed Gmail Add-ons—a way to help businesses speed up workflows. Since then, we’ve seen partners build awesome applications, and beginning today, we’re extending the Gmail add-on preview to include all developers. Now anyone can start building a Gmail add-on.

Gmail Add-ons let you integrate your app into Gmail and extend Gmail to handle quick actions. They are built using native UI context cards that can include simple text dialogs, images, links, buttons and forms. The add-on appears when relevant, and the user is just a click away from your app's rich and integrated functionality.

Gmail Add-ons are easy to create. You only have to write code once for your add-on to work on both web and mobile, and you can choose from a rich palette of widgets to craft a custom UI. Create an add-on that contextually surfaces cards based on the content of a message. Check out this video to see how we created an add-on to collate email receipts and expedite expense reporting.

Per the video, you can see that there are three components to the app’s core functionality. The first component is getContextualAddOn()—this is the entry point for all Gmail Add-ons where data is compiled to build the card and render it within the Gmail UI. Since the add-on is processing expense reports from email receipts in your inbox, the createExpensesCard()parses the relevant data from the message and presents them in a form so your users can confirm or update values before submitting. Finally, submitForm() takes the data and writes a new row in an “expenses” spreadsheet in Google Sheets, which you can edit and tweak, and submit for approval to your boss.

Check out the documentation to get started with Gmail Add-ons, or if you want to see what it's like to build an add-on, go to the codelab to build ExpenseIt step-by-step. While you can't publish your add-on just yet, you can fill out this form to get notified when publishing is opened. We can’t wait to see what Gmail Add-ons you build!

Source: G Suite Developers Blog

Do more from your inbox with Gmail Add-ons

We believe email can do more, which is why we’re launching Gmail Add-ons, a new way to work with your favorite business apps directly in Gmail.

Gmail Add-ons, built for your workflows

Asana: Turn communication with clients, customers and teammates into tasks that can be tracked with your team in Asana, all from your inbox.

Dialpad: Message or call colleagues on your device, any time. Automatically view recent communications or save a new contact straight from Gmail.
DocuSign (coming soon): Sign and execute contracts, agreements and other documents directly in Gmail using the DocuSign add-on.
Hire: Add candidates, manage candidate information and upload resumes without leaving Gmail. You can access full job applications from the Hire add-on.
Intuit QuickBooks Invoicing: Create and send professional invoices directly in Gmail. Let customers pay you online and track invoice status and payments no matter where you are.

ProsperWorks: Easily access prospect or customer data, and log activities from calls, demos and meetings. You can also scan related opportunities, tasks and events.

RingCentral: See the online/offline status of RingCentral contacts, review recent call history, make outbound calls (requires RingCentral for Mobile) and view and send SMS messages.
Smartsheet: Add email content and desired attachments directly to Smartsheet without leaving Gmail.
Streak: Add email threads to deals, view enriched contact info and quickly respond with snippets directly from Gmail with the Streak add-on.
Trello: Turn email into actionable tasks in Trello to give your team a shared perspective on the work that needs to be done.

Wrike: Create Wrike tasks from emails, view and update task details, and send and receive Wrike task comments.

If you're a developer, you can also easily create add-ons for your app or your organization—write your add-on code once and it will run natively in Gmail on web and Android right away. Learn more.

Try Gmail Add-ons today

Knock out action items the minute they hit your inbox. G Suite and Gmail users can check out the G Suite Marketplace to find and install Gmail Add-ons.

Source: The Official Google Blog

Time for a refresh: meet the new Google Calendar for web

Check your schedule. Starting today, a fresh look and new features are coming to Google Calendar on the web to help you manage your time more efficiently and get more done.

We’re taking a lot of what you know and love from Calendar’s mobile application, like the modern color palette and sleek design, and bringing it to the web with a responsive layout that auto-adjusts to your screen size. We’ve also added more features for enterprises to help teams schedule and prepare for meetings.

Over the years, you’ve shared valuable feedback on how we can enhance Calendar to better fit your needs and we’re excited to bring new improvements. Now, it’s even easier to manage your schedule at your desk. In the new Calendar for web, you can:

See conference room details when booking a room. G Suite admins can now enter detailed information about their organization’s meeting rooms—so employees know where a conference room is located, how large it is, and whether it has audio/video equipment or is wheelchair accessible. Employees can simply hover over the room name in Calendar when they want to book a space, and a hovercard will pop up with details about the conference location and resources.

Add rich formatting and hyperlinks to your Calendar invites. Link to relevant spreadsheets, documents or presentations in your Calendar invite and open them directly from the new “Event Detail” view. This can help you create more detailed agendas and ensure all materials are in one place before your meeting starts.

Manage multiple calendars side by side in “Day” view. Now you can view and manage calendars in separate columns. This makes it easier for employees who manage multiple calendars, like administrative assistants, to schedule meetings on behalf of their teams. Click “Day” view and select the calendars you want to compare.

There are a number of other changes in Calendar, too. Now you can see contact information of meeting participants when you hover over their names in a Calendar invite. There’s also a new way to view and restore deleted items in one place in case you accidentally delete a meeting. Additionally, "Day,” "Week,” and "Month" views are now more accessible, featuring better compatibility with screen readers. For more detail on changes, check out this post.

These new changes in Calendar can help your teams better manage their time, and G Suite admins can enable these new updates starting today. Read this post for more information on rollout options.

And if you use Calendar for personal use, click “Use new Calendar” in the upper righthand corner of the main Calendar view to get started.

Source: The Official Google Blog

Time for a refresh: meet the new Google Calendar for web

Check your schedule. Starting today, a fresh look and new features are coming to Google Calendar on the web to help you manage your time more efficiently and get more done.

See conference room details when booking a room. G Suite admins can now enter detailed information about their organization’s meeting rooms—so employees know where a conference room is located, how large it is, and whether it has audio/video equipment or is wheelchair accessible. Employees can simply hover over the room name in Calendar when they want to book a space, and a hovercard will pop up with details about the conference location and resources.

Add rich formatting and hyperlinks to your Calendar invites. Link to relevant spreadsheets, documents or presentations in your Calendar invite and open them directly from the new “Event Detail” view. This can help you create more detailed agendas and ensure all materials are in one place before your meeting starts.

Manage multiple calendars side by side in “Day” view. Now you can view and manage calendars in separate columns. This makes it easier for employees who manage multiple calendars, like administrative assistants, to schedule meetings on behalf of their teams. Click “Day” view and select the calendars you want to compare.

These new changes in Calendar can help your teams better manage their time, and G Suite admins can enable these new updates starting today. Read this post for more information on rollout options.

And if you use Calendar for personal use, click “Use new Calendar” in the upper righthand corner of the main Calendar view to get started.

Source: Google Cloud

8 swift steps G Suite admins can take to secure business data

Security doesn’t have to be complicated. With G Suite, admins can manage and help protect their users with minimal effort because we've designed our tools to be intuitive—like Vault, which helps with eDiscovery and audit needs, and data loss prevention, which helps ensure that your “‘aha”’ moments stay yours. Here are some key security controls that you can deploy with just a few clicks to get more fine-grained control of your organization's security.

1. Enable Hangouts out-of-domain warnings

If your business allows employees to chat with external users on Hangouts, turn on a setting that will show warnings to your users if anyone outside of your domain tries to join a Hangout, and split existing group chats so external users can’t see previous internal conversations. This substantially reduces the risk of data leaks or falling prey to social engineering attacks (From the Admin console dashboard, go to Apps > G Suite > Google Hangouts > Chat settings > Sharing options).

2. Disable email forwarding

Exercising this option will disable the automatic email forwarding feature for users, which in turn helps reduce the risk of data exfiltration in the event a user’s credentials are compromised.

3. Enable early phishing detection

Enabling this option adds further checks on potentially suspicious emails prior to delivery. Early phishing detection utilizes a dedicated machine learning model that selectively delays messages to perform rigorous phishing analysis. Less than 0.05 percent of messages on average get delayed by a few minutes, so your users will still get their information fast.

4. Examine OAuth-based access to third-party apps

OAuth apps whitelisting helps keep company data safe by letting you specifically select which third-party apps are allowed to access users’ G Suite data. Once an app is part of a whitelist, users can choose to grant authorized access to their G Suite apps data. This helps to prevent malicious apps from tricking people into accidentally granting access to corporate data.

5. Check that unintended external reply warning for Gmail is turned on.

Gmail can display unintended external reply warnings to users to help prevent data loss. You can enable this option to ensure that if your users try to respond to someone outside of your company domain, they’ll receive a quick warning to make sure they intended to send that email. Because Gmail has contextual intelligence, it knows if the recipient is an existing contact or someone your users interact with regularly, so it only displays relevant warnings. This option is on by default.

6. Restrict external calendar

To reduce the incidence of data leaks, make sure that Google Calendar details aren’t shared outside your domain. Limiting sharing to “free” or “busy” information protects you from social engineering attacks that depend on gleaning information from meeting titles and attendees.

7. Limit access to Google Groups

By setting default Google group access to private, you can limit external access to information channels that may contain confidential business information, like upcoming projects.

8. Google+ access restrictions

Make the default sharing setting for Google+ restricted and disable discoverability of Google+ profiles outside your domain. Both of these actions can help you control access to critical business information.

Every company has their own unique set of business requirements that need to work in rhythm with their security requirements. By evaluating and implementing some of these suggested security controls, you can make a marked difference in your company’s security posture—with just a few clicks. See this post for other security tips.

Source: The Official Google Blog

8 swift steps G Suite admins can take to secure business data

1. Enable Hangouts out-of-domain warnings

2. Disable email forwarding

Exercising this option will disable the automatic email forwarding feature for users, which in turn helps reduce the risk of data exfiltration in the event a user’s credentials are compromised.

3. Enable early phishing detection

4. Examine OAuth-based access to third-party apps

5. Check that unintended external reply warning for Gmail is turned on.

6. Restrict external calendar

7. Limit access to Google Groups

By setting default Google group access to private, you can limit external access to information channels that may contain confidential business information, like upcoming projects.