Tag Archives: Scheduled Release

Improving consistency of Gmail data across the Security Investigation Tool and BigQuery

What’s changing 

In August 2022, we announced the movement of the existing Gmail logs in BigQuery to Google Workspace logs and reports in BigQuery, creating a single space to access all of your Google Workspace audit events. 


To further improve this experience, you’ll see all Gmail log events from the Security Investigation Tool (SIT) in your Google Workspace logs and reports in BigQuery. This includes device types and post-delivery actions (for example open, delete, clicked links, and attachment downloads). This change will give admins a more complete picture of Gmail activity happening in their domain, and bring consistency across reporting tools. 


Use the table below to familiarize yourself with the newly added columns — complete details can be found in our Help Center.


List of newly added columns

Description

event_info.mail_event_type

The event type corresponds to the Event attribute in Gmail log events in Security Investigation Tool.

event_info.client_context.client_type

The type of client or device where the action occurred, including: WEB, IOS, ANDROID, IMAP, POP3, and API.

event_info.client_context.session_context.delegate_user_email

Email address of the delegated user who performed the action on the account owner's behalf.

message_info.attachment.file_name

File attachment name.

message_info.post_delivery_info

Information about the post-delivery event.

message_info.post_delivery_info.action_type

Post-delivery action type.


message_info.post_delivery_info.interaction

Information about the user's interaction with message links, Drive items, or attachments.

message_info.post_delivery_info.interaction.link_url

The URL associated with the interaction, which is set only for link click interactions.

message_info.post_delivery_info.interaction.drive_id

The unique ID of the Google Drive item associated with the interaction. This ID is used to access the item in Drive.

message_info.post_delivery_info.interaction.attachment

The target attachments of the interaction, which are set only for attachment interactions.

message_info.post_delivery_info.interaction.attachment.file_extension_type

File extension (not MIME part type), not including the period.

message_info.post_delivery_info.interaction.attachment.malware_family

Malware type, if malware is detected during message handling.

message_info.post_delivery_info.interaction.attachment.file_name

Attachment file name.

message_info.post_delivery_info.interaction.attachment.sha256

SHA256 hash of the attachment.


Getting started


Rollout pace


Availability

  • Available to Google Workspace Enterprise Essentials, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Education Plus, Education Standard 
  • Not available to Google Workspace Essentials, Business Starter, Business Standard, Business Plus, Frontline, and Nonprofits, as well as legacy G Suite Basic and Business customers

Resources

 

Contacts delegates can now update labels and manage “Other” contacts

What’s changing 

We’re updating the functionality for delegated users to manage contact labels on behalf of their delegator via contacts.google.com. While this functionality was previously available in Gmail, they can now be managed directly at the source: Contacts. This will happen in two phases: 


Beginning this month, delegators will be prompted to review and re-approve access for their existing delegates. If existing delegates are not re-approved before July 2023, they will lose access to manage contacts. See below for guidance.




Additionally, Admins can make these adjustments for users in their domain using the Admin SDK API to remove and re-add the contacts delegate privilege.


Beginning July 2023,  all users who have been approved or assigned as Contacts delegates will be able to update labels and manage Other contacts.  


Who’s impacted

Admins and end users


Why it’s important

For many of our customers, administrative support for managing inboxes is business critical — this includes making sure that contacts are properly sorted and labeled. 

Getting started


Rollout pace


Availability

  • Available to all Google Workspace customers

Resources

Enable your users to report inappropriate messages for review

What’s changing

For select Google Workspace customers, admins can enable content reporting for their Google Chat users. Once a user has flagged a message, admins can find more information about the incident in the Security Investigation Tool and decide whether further action is needed. This feature is available for Google Chat on the web and mobile devices.

Admins can turn content reporting on for 1:1 messages, group messages, or messages in spaces, and select which reporting categories are available for their users, such as harassment or rude behavior, sensitive information, and more. Admins can also customize the language in the reporting dialog box to educate users about next steps following the report submission.

When you turn content reporting on, you can select which reporting categories to show to your users and which conversation types content reporting is available for.

Who’s impacted

Admins and end users 


Why it’s important

Effective collaboration in the modern workplace requires a sense of psychological safety for users and appropriate protections for sensitive business data. Content reporting in Google Chat enables users the opportunity to report inappropriate messages for review. This can include anything from offensive , discriminatory or explicit content, sensitive data that should not be shared (personal or proprietary), and more. This is critical for our customers, especially those of larger organizations and in regulated industries, to stay on top of potential abuse and inappropriate use of Chat in their organization. 


Further, admins can use the Security Investigation Tool Administrator to decide whether data protection rules need to be created to proactively prevent similar messages from being shared in the future.

In the Security Investigation Tool, you can search for reported messages, view additional conversation information, and see the chat transcript for more context.




Along with recent updates such as managing Google Chat spaces in the admin console, we hope this feature helps admins manage Chat across their organization.


Getting started

Reporting a message on the web

 
Reporting a message on a mobile device


Rollout pace



Availability

  • Available to Google Workspace Enterprise Plus, Education Standard, and Education Plus customers

Resources






Monitor abuse related events in the Alert Center

What’s changing 

Admins will now receive alerts related to abuse related events in their organization. This includes events related to content that has been marked abusive or user access restrictions to apps. 


This update makes it easier for admins to stay on top of abuse within their accounts, and easily take necessary action such as suspending users or restricting access to certain services. 

Admins will be alerted via email of abuse related events and can find more information in the Alert Center



Getting started

  • Admins: 
  • End users: There is no end user action required. 

Rollout pace 


Availability 

  • Available to all Google Workspace customers

Resources

Create custom building blocks in Google Docs

What’s changing

Today, we’re introducing custom building blocks in Google Docs, one of the latest innovations in smart canvas that brings people and data into a single workflow to save time and keep you focused. 

This feature enables you to save custom blocks of text, tables, and chips to build reusable components. For example, you might create a project kickoff template to track milestones and tasks, a product launch checklist, or even a block of code or text that’s commonly used within your organization. Rather than reworking the out-of-the-box building blocks to meet your specific needs or searching for a template that you frequently copy/paste into a new Doc, you can save that snippet or the entire document as a custom building block, and easily insert the content into other documents. 
Custom building blocks in Google Docs

Getting started 

  • Admins: There is no admin control for this feature. 
  • End users: 
    • To create custom building blocks, select any part of a document that you have access to copy from > right click and select "Save as custom building block" > name the block and click save. 
      • Note: Custom building blocks are saved as documents in your Google Drive in a folder called "Custom Building Blocks (auto-generated)", where you can reorganize, edit, or delete those documents as you wish. 
    • To insert the custom building block in a document, type "@" and the name of your block > hit enter or scroll down to "building blocks" > select the name of your building block. 
    • Visit the Help Center to learn more about inserting custom building blocks.

Rollout pace 



Availability 

  • Available to Google Workspace Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Education Plus customers and Nonprofits 
  • Not available to Google Workspace Essentials, Business Starter, Enterprise Essentials, Education Fundamentals, Education Standard, the Teaching and Learning Upgrade, Frontline, as well as legacy G Suite Basic and Business customers 
  • Not available to users with personal Google Accounts 

Resources 

Easily expand and collapse content in Google Docs

What’s changing

We’re introducing a new feature that helps you minimize and expand sections within Google Docs. This collapsible headings function makes it easier to consume content by enabling you to hide portions of larger documents more easily. 
Easily expand and collapse content in Google Docs

Who’s impacted

End users 

Why you’d use it 

This highly requested feature helps you create and consume more digestible content in Docs. Editors of a document will have the ability to set the default state of headers to expanded or collapsed for all users. Users with view and comment access are able to expand and collapse content when they have the document open, and when they close the document their expand/collapse changes will not be saved. 

Getting started 


Rollout pace 


Availability

  • Available to all Google Workspace customers, as well as legacy G Suite Basic and Business customers 
  • Available to users with personal Google Accounts 

Resources 

New membership limits for Google Groups

What’s changing

As a security measure, the Google Groups for Business service has limits for message activity, group size, invitations, and membership. Starting today, we’re increasing the limits for the number of direct and indirect group memberships for which a user can have:

  • Direct: 3,000 memberships (increasing from 2,000)
  • Combined direct and indirect: 7,500 memberships (increasing from 5,000)

If you're the owner or manager of a group, it counts as two memberships—one as a group member and one as the owner or manager. A user is an indirect member of a group if they belong to a different group that's nested in the group. Visit the Help Center to learn more.

Increasing these membership limits gives our customers more flexibility to scale and manage their use of Groups, especially those with complex group structures.

Getting started


Rollout pace


Availability

  • Available to all Google Workspace customers

Resources


Enhancing spam protection in Google Drive

This announcement was made at Google I/O ‘23. Visit the Keyword Blog to learn more about new features and updates to improve online safety.

What’s changing

There will now be a dedicated spam folder within Google Drive to host unwanted files that are shared with you containing spam or abusive content. When an unsolicited file is moved to the spam folder, you will be unsubscribed, preventing all comment, sharing, and mobile push notifications for the file. Once unsubscribed, you will not be able to find the file anywhere in Drive outside of your spam folder. 

Similar to how the spam folder works in Gmail, automatic classifiers will redirect files that Drive strongly suspects to be unwanted to the spam folder. You will also be able to manually move Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Sites, and Forms files in and out of the spam folder. After a file has resided within the spam folder for over 30 days, it will be permanently removed from Drive. 
Google Drive Spam View

Who’s impacted 

End users 


Why it’s important 

This feature improves the security of Google Drive by giving users a new way to suppress potentially malicious content to stay safe and distraction free. We’ve offered best-in-class Gmail and Drive spam, phishing, and malware prevention for years, but Drive has lacked a spam folder, similar to the Gmail spam folder, to place unwanted content. By introducing a spam view, we’re simultaneously giving users more control over their content while blocking harmful files without risking impact to our users. 


Additional details 

You will see the new spam folder on the Drive homepage on Web, Android, iOS and Drive for Desktop. 


Getting started 

  • Admins: There is no admin control for this feature. 
  • End users: 
    • To move a folder to Spam, you can select “report spam” from the context menu or drag the file into the spam folder in the left hand navigation menu. 
    • Visit the Help Center to learn more about marking or unmarking spam in Drive. 

Rollout pace 

Availability 

  • Available to all Google Workspace customers, as well as legacy G Suite Basic and Business customers 
  • Available to users with personal Google Accounts 

Resources 

Manage all spaces in Google Chat through the Admin Console

What’s changing 

We’re introducing a new section in the admin console dedicated to managing spaces in Google Chat. Here, admins can see a list of all spaces in their domain, the members of those spaces, and take actions such as adding members or changing a members role. 


View all of the spaces in your organization

See all members, including space managers, for a particular space

Adding members to a space via the Space Management tool


Assigning roles to a member via the Space Management tool



Add new members to a space and specify their role.









Who’s impacted

Admins 


Why it’s important 

Spaces in Google Chat are an essential part of collaboration and community building across organizations of all sizes. As such, it’s important for admins to easily view and manage their spaces to keep them productive and safe. You can look up specific spaces based on it’s ID or name and take actions such as reviewing members of each individual space, adding members or assigning new space managers. 

Further, the space management tool gives admins the information that will allow them to better understand how spaces are used in their organization: 
  • The number of members in the space 
  • Whether conversation history is on or off for the space 
  • Sharing permissions for a space 
  • Active spaces and spaces with no recent activity 

Additional details 

This feature is available for all super admins by default. Delegated admins need to have the “Manage chat and space conversations” role to access space management — visit the Help Center to learn more about administrator roles. 

Getting started 
  • Admins: In the Admin console, navigate to Apps > Google Workspace > Settings for Google Chat > Manage spaces. Visit the Help Center to learn more about managing spaces in the Admin console. 



  • End users: There is no end user action required. 

Rollout pace 


Availability 

  • Available to all Google Workspace customers 

Expanding upon Gmail security with BIMI

What’s changing 

In 2021, we introduced Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) in Gmail, a feature that requires senders to use strong authentication and verify their brand logo in order to display a brand logo as an avatar in emails. 

Building upon that feature, users will now see a checkmark icon for senders that have adopted BIMI. This will help users identify messages from legitimate senders versus impersonators. 
Expanding upon Gmail security with BIMI

Who’s impacted 

Admins and end users 


Why it matters 

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 such as Entrust or DigiCert. 
  • End users: There is no end user setting for this feature. 

Rollout pace 


Availability 

  • Available to all Google Workspace customers, as well as legacy G Suite Basic and Business customers 
  • Available to users with personal Google Accounts 

Resources