Category: G Suite

Dropbox has announced a major integration plan with Google Cloud that ultimately will result in users of the cloud storage service to be able to access their G Suite files from it.  The news essentially means that Dropbox would replace Google Drive as the storage location for these files and access to them.

In the announcement, the San Francisco based Dropbox outlined a series of integrations that will be happening this year.   There were no specific timelines announced other than later in 2018.

Google has announced that the Quick Access feature will be rolling out to Google Docs for G Suite business and enterprise customers.  Functionally, it is very similar to the Quick Access feature that is found in all versions of Google Drive.  For Google Docs however, it is more AI driven based on Drive activity as well as the content of the files themselves.

Quick Access for Docs uses artificial intelligence to suggest relevant files based on signals like Drive activity and information in your documents, so you can work with the most up-to-date information and create new material quickly.

Google points out that for this feature to work, customers must have Google Cloud Search enabled on their domain.

For the third month in a row, Google has begun rolling out menu tweaks to some of the G Suite apps today.  The update that is rolling out today impacts Google Docs and Google Sheets online and will be coming to all G Suite customers over the course of the next week or two.

Like the updates from last month, these tweaks are aimed at making navigation within Google Docs and Google Sheets easier by clarifying what a function does.  These are all visual changes and not changes in function.

Team Drive, the G Suite equivalent of Google Drive with a lot more sharing and searching functionality, is getting a new email feature added to it.  The new feature will allow users to email all members of a Team Drive.

The feature will work two ways according to the announcement by the G Suite team:

• From the Team Drive: Navigate to the Team Drive, click the drop-down menu next to the Team Drive name, and click “Email members.”
• From within a file that is in the Team Drive: While editing or viewing the document, open the File menu, and click “Email Collaborators.”

Once you have selected to email everyone, you can customize the list of recipients.

File this under the “better late than never” category.  Over a year after releasing the ability to manage iOS devices, even those without a Mobile Device Management (MDM) profile, Google has added the same functionality for Android devices in G Suite.  The feature means that admins can set basic security requirements on Android devices without requiring the BOYD owner to install a MDM profile on their phone.

When Basic Mobile Management is enabled, admins can:

• Enforce a device screen lock. (Lollipop or later)
• Wipe a corporate account (but not the entire device).
• View, search, and manage their device inventory.

It is unclear why it took Google so long to add this functionality for Android devices but likely has to do with the shear number of devices that are out on the market with various configurations.

Google has announced a further integration of Google Drive and Slack where you will now be able to see Slack related activity on a file that has been shared on Drive.  The announcement indicates that the new activity feed works two ways:

Two types of actions are logged as events: someone sharing a file stored in Google Drive, and someone commenting—within Slack—on a Google Drive file that has been shared in Slack.

The good news is that these comments and activities are only available on files that have been shared on specific Slack teams or channels.