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Place legal holds on Hangouts Chat messages
In addition to setting retention policies, you can now place legal holds on your employees' Hangouts Chat conversations, whether they take place via direct message or in rooms.

Doing so will preserve room conversations in which a held user is a participant (i.e. they’ve sent a message) and direct messages in which a held user is a member (i.e. they’ve sent or received a message), regardless of whether that user deletes those messages. If a user on hold deletes a message, it will appear deleted to them—but it will be available in Vault until the hold is removed. Remember that holds always take precedence over retention rules.


Search, preview and export chat content 
Finally, you can now search, preview, and export your employees’ Hangouts Chat messages. This enables you to apply the same eDiscovery programs you use for other G Suite services (like Gmail and Drive) to content stored in Hangouts Chat direct messages and rooms.


To learn more about how Vault's support for Hangouts Chat can help your organization meet its legal obligations and archiving needs, check out the Vault Help Center.

Launch Details
Release track:
Launching to both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release

Editions:
Available to G Suite Business, Enterprise, and Education editions only

Rollout pace:
Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility)

Impact:
Admins only

Action:
Admin action suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center: Google Vault
Help Center: Supported data types
The Keyword: New ways to help teams work faster and smarter with G Suite
The Keyword: Move projects forward from one place—Hangouts Chat now available
G Suite Updates: Hangouts Chat now generally available



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You can find our full list of pre-integrated applications, as well as instructions for installing them, in the Help Center

Note that apart from the pre-integrated SAML applications, G Suite also supports installing “Custom SAML Applications,” which means that admins can install any third-party application that supports SAML. The advantage of a pre-integrated app is that the installation is much easier. You can learn more about installing Custom SAML Applications in this Help Center article.

Launch Details 
Release track
Launching to both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release

Editions: 
Available to all G Suite editions and Cloud Identity customers

Rollout pace: 
Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility)

Impact:
Admins only

Action:
Admin action suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center: Using SAML to set up federated SSO

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Ownership sharing configuration for unclaimed Jams
To ensure that Jams get assigned to the correct owner, we’re adding an email confirmation step to claim an unclaimed Jam. Once an admin has enabled this option, when working with an unclaimed Jam, users will need to confirm ownership via email before they are added as an owner. Users can enter multiple in-domain email addresses to confirm ownership, directly from the Jam. Those user(s) will receive an email asking if they’d like to claim the document and the first user to confirm becomes the owner.

This feature prevents sharing of content before an owner is assigned.

Admins can configure this setting (which is off by default) for the domain in the Jamboard Admin console.



Animated frame changes with page numbers
Whenever you change a frame on your Jamboard device, we now will show a distinct frame-change animation along with the page number.



USB camera support
Users can connect a USB camera and select which camera feed they want to use (either USB camera or internal camera) in the settings panel of the Jamboard kiosk.

S/PDIF audio support
Users can attach external speakers to the board via S/PDIF (a rear port on the back of the device for optical audio). For a full list of new features and improvements from this month’s release, check out the What’s New in Jamboard page in the Help Center.

Launch Details
Release track:
Launching to both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release

Editions:
Available to all G Suite Basic, Business, Enterprise, and Education customers

Rollout pace:
Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility)

Impact:
All end users

Action:
Change management suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center

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For more details on these features and how to use them, see below.

Control when changes are synced to Google Drive 

End users can now pause Drive File Stream syncing. While paused, Drive File Stream will not upload local changes to Google Drive, and new versions of files made available offline will not download. 

To pause syncing, open the Drive File Stream menu and click More > Pause Syncing.

Customize the cache location 

Admins can now customize the content cache location for Drive File Stream to any directory on a connected APFS, HFS+, or NTFS file system.

For details, see our Help Center on how to configure Drive File Stream.

Limit the bandwidth used 

Admins can now limit the bandwidth of Drive File Stream for uploads and downloads.

For details, see our Help Center on how to configure Drive File Stream.

Customize drive letter or mount point 

In a previous release, we added a feature that allows Admins to customize the default letter drive on Windows, the mount point on macOS, and proxy settings. These configurations can be set at the user or host-wide level, and persist when Drive File Stream restarts.

For details, see our Help Center on how to configure Drive File Stream.

Launch Details 

Release track:
Launching to both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release

Editions: 
Available to all G Suite editions

Rollout pace: 
Full rollout (1–3 days for feature visibility)

Impact: 
Admins and end users

Action: 
Admin action and change management suggested/FYI

More Information 
Help Center: Configure Drive File Stream
Help Center: Drive File Stream release notes


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Changes that only affect Google Sheets menus:


These changes will only affect the visual menu on the web version of these products. All options will still be available via keyboard shortcuts and the search box in the Help menu.


Launch Details
Release track:
Launching to Rapid Release, with Scheduled Release coming in two weeks

Editions:
Available to all G Suite editions

Rollout pace:
Extended rollout (potentially longer than 15 days for feature visibility)

Impact:
All end users

Action:
Change management suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center: Keyboard shortcuts for Google Docs
Help Center: Keyboard shortcuts for Google Sheets
Help Center: Docs editors homepage


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There are two ways to email members of a Team Drive:
When you select to email members, you can easily customize who your email is sent to. Use checkboxes to include or exclude “Members” who have access to the full Team Drive, “Guests” who only have access to that specific document within the Team Drive, and users with different Team Drive access levels, such as “Full,” “Edit,” “Comment,” and “View.”

For more information on Team Drives, see how to manage Team Drives. For information on user permissions in Team Drives, see our Learning Center article on Team Drives.


Launch Details
Release track:
Launching to both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release

Editions:
Available to all G Suite editions. Team Drives is available on G Suite Enterprise, G Suite Business, and G Suite for Education editions. G Suite Basic users can’t create Team Drives, but can use the feature if they have access to a Team Drive.

Rollout pace:
Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility)

Impact:
All end users

Action:
Change management suggested/FYI

More Information
G Suite Learning Center: Get started with Team Drives
Help Center: Get started with Team Drives


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To help you better manage runtime permissions for Android apps*, we’re introducing two new settings in the Admin console for customers using Google Mobile Management.

The first will give G Suite admins three options for management of all runtime permissions on all Android apps: (1) allow runtime permissions automatically, (2) deny runtime permissions automatically, or (3) prompt the end user to choose whether to grant runtime permissions. The last setting is the default; it can be changed in the Admin console under Device Management > Android Settings > Apps and Data Sharing.


The second setting can be found under the App Distribution and Configuration options provided when an Android app is whitelisted. This setting will allow admins to manage runtime permissions for that specific app. For example, an admin can forbid the app to access the device’s location or contacts. Where there are conflicts, this setting will take priority over the app-wide setting mentioned above.



*IMPORTANT: Android apps will only request permissions at runtime if the device is running Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) or higher and the app itself targets API level 23 or higher. The second setting mentioned above will be greyed out in Admin console if the app doesn’t target API23+. If you’re unsure of whether an app will request runtime permissions, we recommend contacting the app developer.

Launch Details
Release track:
Launching to both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release

Editions:
Available to all G Suite editions

Rollout pace:
Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility)

Impact:
Admins only

Action:
Admin action suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center: Manage apps on mobile devices
Help Center: Apply settings for Android mobile devices


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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.


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.”


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 with and then select Docs (or 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.

Additional information for G Suite admins

As a part of this launch, we will also change the “Can view” permission setting for MS Office files. This creates further interoperability between Google Drive, Microsoft Office and other popular applications. What is changing?:

In addition to making and replying to file-level comments while previewing a file in Google Drive Preview, users can now make new inline (a.k.a. anchored) comments, for example:

This new feature also supports importing and exporting comments to the underlying file for certain OOXML file formats such as MS Office file formats(.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) and PDF files. This means that existing comments available in those file formats will be imported and displayed in Drive Preview. Additionally, comments made in Drive Preview will be exported to the underlying file so that when you open up the file using the local client application, you will be able to see the comments made in Drive Preview.

Launch Details
Release track:
- Web: Launching to Rapid Release, with Scheduled Release coming in 5 weeks
- Mobile: Launching to both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release

Editions:
Available to all G Suite editions

Rollout pace:



*On web, we’ll roll out these features to Rapid Release domains over the course of three weeks. Two weeks after we complete the rollout to Rapid Release, we’ll begin the rollout to Scheduled Release. We anticipate it will take up to three weeks after that point to roll out to 100% of Scheduled Release domains.

Impact:
All end users

Action:
Change management suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center: Comment on Microsoft Office files, PDFs, images, and other files in Google Drive

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(Cross-posted from The Keyword)

TJ Varghese, Product Manager, G Suite
Katie Roberts-HoffmanProduct Manager, G Suite




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:

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:


To learn more about Hangouts Meet hardware, check out our website or reach out to your Google Cloud representative or your reseller.

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


Launch Details
Release track:

Editions:
Jamboard and Hangouts Meet hardware are available to all G Suite editions

Impact:
All end users

Action:
Change management suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center: Install your Meet or Chromebox system
Help Center: Where are Chrome devices for meetings sold and supported?

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Check out the latest "What's New in G Suite" launch recap [pdf] for a roundup of all G Suite launches from January 2018.

Archive & Translated Versions (coming soon for January issue)


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