Tag Archives: Rapid Release

Gmail allows more senders to protect their brand using BIMI Common Mark Certificates

What’s changing

Since 2021, Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) has been critical in building trust between email senders and email recipients. To qualify for BIMI, senders must adopt best practices and have their domains and brand logos verified by a third party. Together, this helps foster trust among recipients, allowing them to easily identify emails for legitimate sources. Today, we’re pleased to announce two additional updates for BIMI that will continue to keep inboxes safe: 


Gmail now supports Common Mark Certificates (CMC), a new type of BIMI certificate being issued by Certificate Authorities (CA). CMCs allow a broader range of senders to utilize BIMI, who might not have the registered trademark required for a Verified Mark Certificate (VMC). With a CMC, the sender's brand avatar will be displayed without the Gmail verified checkmark that's displayed for VMCs. 


BIMI verified check marks are now displayed on Android and iOS. Currently, Gmail on the web will display a verified checkmark for senders who have adopted BIMI with a registered trademark (VMC). Over the next few weeks, users will also see those verified checkmark icons while using the Gmail application on Android and iOS (Apple Mail or other mail applications are not supported). Note that this update is applicable for VMCs only.



Who’s impacted

Admins and end users


Why it’s important

BIMI promotes another layer of security to Gmail by requiring strong authentication and verification of logos before they’re displayed in Gmail as avatars. Strong email authentication helps users and email security systems identify and stop spam, and also enables senders to leverage their brand trust. This increases confidence in email sources and gives readers an immersive experience, creating a better email ecosystem for everyone. 


Getting started

  • Admins:
    • Visit the Help Center to learn more about setting up BIMI. 
    • To learn more about BIMI and see the latest news, visit the working group’s website. 
    • To take advantage of BIMI for your outgoing emails to Gmail and other platforms, ensure that your organization has adopted DMARC, and that you have validated your logo with a VMC, issued by a Certification Authority.
  • End users: Users will see verified brand logos, and sometimes a checkmark icon, for senders who have adopted BIMI. 

Rollout pace


Availability

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

Resources


Preview and test upcoming features on Google Meet hardware devices

What’s changing 

Using the new “Feature preview” setting, specific Google Meet hardware devices can be configured to test upcoming features prior to general availability. This is especially beneficial for testing purposes, gathering user feedback, creating training materials, and raising awareness before the feature is released broadly to your users.

Menu > Devices > Google Meet hardware > Settings > Feature preview


Who’s impacted

Admins and end users 


Why you’d use it

Prior to the launch of the “Feature preview” setting, there was no way for admins to preview upcoming features before they roll out to hardware devices, which can be potentially confusing to end users when they see new features unexpectedly. Now, customers have the opportunity to preview changes in advance, which gives them time to inform and educate their users about upcoming changes, prepare their IT help desks, and more. Overall, this update aims to increase awareness and adoption of helpful meeting features while reducing the risk of end user confusion.


Getting started

  • Admins: The “Feature preview” setting is configured to “General availability” by default. When “Early preview” is selected, devices will receive new features when they are released to the “preview” stage. Visit the Help Center to learn more about trying features early on your devices. We recommend that 10% or less of your fleet adopts “Early preview” to try new experiences in conference rooms before they roll out to General availability.
  • End users: Depending on your organization’s configuration, you may be able to preview new features on select Google Meet hardware devices.
When enabled, the device screen displays a "Preview" banner indicating the device is currently in "Early preview" mode


Rollout pace


Availability

  • Available to all Google Workspace customers with Google Meet hardware devices

Resources




Customize your Google Docs with polished cover images

What’s changing 

We’re making it easy for you to personalize and differentiate documents with full-bleed cover images that extend from one edge of your document to the other. 


Whether you’re customizing a document for a customer with industry themes, personalizing an onboarding document for a new employee or building a virtual brochure for your company’s products, cover images help set the tone for a document by adding relevant visuals. 


You can add cover images from our curated gallery or upload your own image. To insert, you can either: 
  • Click the new “Cover image” chip at the top of your Doc (similar to the ones introduced last year). 
  • Go to Insert > Cover image > Upload from computer or Choose from stock images. 
  • Type “@” followed by Cover image > Upload from computer or Choose from stock images. 
Adding a cover image to your Google Doc


Additional details 

Cover images can only be added to documents set to pageless mode, allowing the image to span the entire width of the document. To set up the more immersive experience of pageless mode, go to File > Page setup > Pageless or Format > Switch to Pageless format. 


Getting started 


Rollout pace


Availability

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

Resources 

Introducing security advisor, a new set of tools and insights to help small businesses protect their organization against cyber attacks

What’s changing

The cyber threat landscape is evolving and there's been an increase in the sophistication and volume of malicious threats. Small businesses frequently lack the time, resources, and expertise that larger organizations have to implement robust security measures. As a result, threat actors often perceive these organizations as easier targets.

To help small businesses, we’re introducing security advisor, a set of new insights and tools designed to enhance security for small businesses – including threat defense, account security, and data protection capabilities. Security advisor offers tailored security insights, actionable guidance in the admin console, and simplified data protection controls — all to help businesses keep their customer data safe.

With security advisor, applying security settings is easier than before and the recommended settings can be easily adopted and customized to meet the specific needs of each organization in just a few steps. This helps organizations elevate their security posture, helps their IT team be more efficient by simplifying admin work, and helps reduce the risk of misconfigured security settings with a guided, in-app experience in the Admin console.

In addition to security insights in the Admin console, the security advisor feature set includes the following:

Admin console > Security > Security advisor


Getting started


Rollout pace


Availability

  • Available for Google Workspace Business Starter, Standard, and Plus

Resources


Kickstart ideas, brainstorm activities, and differentiate content with the help of Gemini in Google Classroom

What’s changing

Earlier this year, we introduced the Gemini Education and Gemini Education Premium add-ons to give education customers ​​new and powerful ways of working, teaching and learning with Gemini for Google Workspace. We also piloted Gemini in Google Classroom with new lesson planning features that are informed by LearnLM, our new family of models fine-tuned for learning, based on Gemini and grounded in educational research. 


Today, we’re excited to officially introduce a new Gemini Education tab in Classroom that grants quick access to the following AI tools: 

  • Outline a lesson plan: Use a scaffolded experience to generate lesson plan ideas based on what you’d like students to be able to demonstrate 
  • Craft a compelling hook: Spark curiosity and engage your students with a compelling start for your class 
  • Generate a quiz: Generate a quiz and export to Forms based on target grade level, length, and the types of questions you want to include 
  • Re-level text: Generate a new version of your text based on target grade level 
We are working closely with schools and educators globally to develop additional helpful tools. If you’re interested in joining the pilot program, learn more here. 

Gemini in Google Classroom



Who’s impacted 

Admins and end users 


Why it’s important 

Gemini in Google Classroom provides educators with a suite of generative AI tools that can generate new and unique content and make learning more personal and engaging for students. 


Additional details 

Gemini in Classroom is only available in English for education users over the age of 18. 


Getting started 

Rollout pace 

Availability 

Available for Google Workspace customers with these add-ons: 
  • Gemini Education and Education Premium 

Resources 

Additional iOS data exfiltration enhancement: account level data sharing between Google Workspace apps and non-Google Workspace apps on or off

What’s changing 

Admins can now enable content sharing on personal Workspace accounts while preventing data sharing from corporate Workspace accounts on iOS devices.




Additionally, admins can now prevent data sharing from unknown sources (typically non-Google Workspace apps) to personal Workspace accounts on Gmail, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Chat, and more, by setting a managed configuration. 

The {customer_id} is a unique customer ID that’s assigned to your account. You can find it in your Admin console at Account > Account settings > Profile.



Getting started

  • Admins: Blocking sending of work data to personal apps, including all non-Google Workspace apps on the iOS share sheet, will be OFF by default and can be enabled at the OU level. These settings can be configured in the Admin console under Devices > Mobile and endpoints > iOS settings > Data Sharing. Visit the Help Center to learn more about data protection on iOS devices. Use this article in our Help Center to learn more about how to set up the managed configuration, go to set up iOS apps with managed configurations.

  • End users: Sharing of data between Google Workspace apps and non-Google Workspace apps depends on your admin configuration. If you’re unable to share data between apps, you may see a warning message. Visit the Help Center to learn more about how your iOS device is managed.


Rollout pace


Availability

Available for Google Workspace:
  • Enterprise Standard and Plus
  • Education Standard and Plus
  • Enterprise Essentials Plus
  • Frontline Standard
  • Cloud Identity Premium

Resources



Create birthdays in Google Calendar

What’s changing 

Currently, Google Calendar automatically pulls in birthday information from Google Contacts. However, it is not currently possible to create birthday events directly in Calendar. 

To ensure a birthday is never missed, we’re introducing the ability to create and modify birthday events in Google Calendar on Android devices. 

For developers, newly created birthday events will be available in the Calendar API with the eventType “birthday.” Both Events.list and Events.watch will support the “birthday” event type filter and return “birthday” events by default. Only a subset of the event properties will be supported for birthday events. To learn more, see our developer guide about working with the birthday event type.

Create birthdays in Google Calendar

Who’s impacted

End users and developers 


Additional details 

Birthday events do not support all event properties. If you’re using the Calendar API, we recommend reviewing your code so you don’t apply any non-supported properties. 

Creating dedicated birthday events in Google Calendar will also become available on web and iOS devices in the future. 


Getting started 

Rollout pace 

Web: 
Mobile: 

Availability 

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

Resources 

Admin features for space management via the Chat API are now generally available

What’s changing

Earlier this year, we introduced a series of space management capabilities for Workspace admins in the Google Chat API via the Google Workspace Developer Preview Program. These API features are now generally available for all Google Workspace customers and developers.

Using these features, admins can easily perform a variety of space management related tasks at scale. This includes membership management, like adding and removing members, onboarding and offboarding users from spaces, cleaning up inactive spaces, and more. 

These features are also available when using the Google Apps Manager (GAM), an open source command-line tool that helps administrators to perform bulk operations associated with various aspects of their Google Workspace. The tool can be used to automate space management tasks with command-line scripts, helping to reduce admin overhead and potential errors when using APIs. See this article in our Help Center for more information on using a third-party tool for mass provisioning.

Who’s impacted

Admins and developers

Why you’d use it

In 2023, we launched the Space Management tool, which allowed admins to view all the spaces within their organization, understand the activity within those spaces, and perform essential actions like deleting a space or assigning space managers. While finding the tool helpful to perform one-off tasks, admins expressed a desire for tools to perform these tasks at scale, for example, with the help of APIs. Admins can now use the Chat API to find information and manage spaces in their organization in bulk or programmatically. Specifically they can:

  • Find and delete inactive spaces: Using spaces.search, you can find spaces that haven’t been used since a specified date and time and then delete them.
  • Onboard and offboard users: Automatically add new users to relevant spaces and remove them from spaces when they leave or change roles.
  • Audit external members: Monitor and control access to your organization's data by identifying and removing external members from sensitive conversations.
  • Lookup and update space details: Easily manage space information like names, descriptions, and guidelines.
  • Verify user membership and upgrade roles: Manage user access and roles within spaces.
  • And more — please refer to our developer guidance for even more information.

Getting started

NotebookLM now available as an Additional Service

What’s changing 

Last year, we introduced an Early Access App called NotebookLM, an experimental product using some of Google's most advanced models, like Gemini 1.5 Pro, that helps you gain critical insights grounded in the content of source documents you trust. 

Today, we’re excited to announce that NotebookLM is officially available as an Additional Service. 

Over the past year, NotebookLM, now available globally in over 100 languages, has been made more powerful with new features, and early users have been using NotebookLM to supercharge their learning and work. For example, NotebookLM can: 
  • Be an interactive expert in your trusted sources: Once you upload source documents (e.g. Google Doc and Slides, PDFs, web URLs, copied text) into a notebook, you can ask NotebookLM questions about the information in your sources. As a result, it will respond with an answer from the sources you’ve uploaded along with inline citations from those documents to show you what NotebookLM based its answers on. 

  • Generate new ideas and connect dots: NotebookLM can also be used to generate a variety of content based on your sources, like summaries, briefing docs, timelines, FAQs, study guides or even audio overviews (a new feature that lets you listen to a conversation about your source). NotebookLM can also spark creativity, help you brainstorm new ideas and make connections in your sources. You can save a response to a note, so you can come back to polish it later.

NotebookLM demo


Who’s impacted

Admins and end users 18+ 


Why you’d use it 

NotebookLM is an AI-powered research assistant that lets people in your organization interact with trusted source content to get grounded insights. You can upload sources, such as your research notes, course materials, interview transcripts, or corporate documents, and instantly NotebookLM becomes an expert in the material that matters most to you. 


Additional details 

As an Enterprise or Education user whose use of Google Drive is subject to the Workspace Terms of Service or the Workspace for Education Terms of Service, your uploads, queries and the model's responses in NotebookLM will not be used or reviewed by human reviewers to train AI models. NotebookLM is an Additional Service covered under the Google Terms of Service. 


Getting started 


Rollout pace

  • This feature is available now. 

Availability

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

Resources 

New design and accessibility improvements for embedded Google Calendars

What’s changing

Users currently have the ability to add an interactive version of their Google Calendar to their website, and add buttons for their website visitors to save their calendar events.

Starting today, you’ll notice a refreshed look and feel for embedded calendars that is in line with Google Material Design 3 and now includes: 

  • Enhanced accessibility features, such as the ability to use an embedded calendar with a screen reader and keyboard shortcuts to navigate more easily. 
  • Improved spacing to make text easier to read. 
  • A responsive layout that adapts to different screen sizes seamlessly. 
Screenshot of update look and feel for embedded Google Calendars on web


Getting started 

Screenshot of update look and feel for embedded Google Calendars on mobile

Rollout pace

  • Rapid Release domains: Extended rollout (potentially longer than 15 days for feature visibility) starting on September 17, 2024 
  • Scheduled Release domains: Extended rollout (potentially longer than 15 days for feature visibility) starting on October 7, 2024 

Availability 

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

Resources