Looking back (and ahead) in G Suite

This year marked a few milestones for G Suite: Gmail turned 15, Apps Script celebrated its 10th birthday, and we launched nearly 300 product and feature updates to help businesses move toward a modern way of working. Let’s take a moment to reflect on all of the things we’ve accomplished together by looking at a few highlights from 2019.

Businesses get the “assist” 

We say it all the time; working in the cloud opens up opportunities to improve productivity and collaboration in the workplace. This is why companies like PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC), ATB Financial and Chrysler Fiat are using G Suite to transform what work looks like for their business—people are collaborating in documents at the same time and communicating in flexible ways to suit their work styles, whether over email, chat, or face-to-face in video conferencing. And this fundamentally improves productivity.

Perhaps the (not-so) hidden gem of cloud collaboration is that it also makes using artificial intelligence possible. This year, we announced even more helpful AI-powered features in G Suite, including new features in Google Docs to help people write high-quality documents, fast. We also expanded integrations with the Google Assistant to help you get work done while on the go. Learn more.

Making sure your Voice is heard

Simplifying security for businesses

We’re committed to bringing businesses tools that provide transparency, and that can help them confidently and simply secure their data in G Suite (This includes taking measures to improve the security of third-party apps that access G Suite data, too.). We introduced a few security tools to businesses this year:

• Protecting high-risk users from attacks: Google’s Advanced Protection Program (APP) is our strongest protection for users at risk of targeted attacks, like journalists, activists, business leaders, and political campaign teams. This year, we made these protections available to all G Suite users for enrollment. APP for the enterprise enforces a specific set of policies such as security key enforcement, blocking access to untrusted apps and enhanced scanning for email threats. In addition, to provide stronger protection against zero day threats, we also introduced the security sandbox for Gmail. 

• New endpoint management and intelligent access controls for admins: Securing devices is one of the best ways for businesses to help keep data safe. This is why we automatically enabled fundamental desktop management for your desktop devices that access G Suite. This means employees don’t have to install agents or profiles on Mac, Windows, Chrome or Linux devices. Alongside context-aware access—which allows you to dynamically control access to G Suite apps based on a user’s identity and the context of their request, like device security status, IP address, etc.—we now provide a strong set of intelligent enforcement controls for devices accessing G Suite. 

• Helping admins work collaboratively to solve security issues: The G Suite security center already helps you protect your organization with security analytics and best practice recommendations from Google. New, admins can now create automated rules to remediate issues or send notifications to the alert center, making it possible for teams of admins and analysts to collaborate on security investigations to manage threats.

• Making our processes more transparent: We work hard to earn and maintain trust with our customers. Access Transparency supports this commitment to customer trust by giving you fine-grained logs of actions taken by Google staff and the reason for each access, including references to specific support tickets where relevant.

More integrations to make work flow

The most impactful work that happens in business is usually a result of people coming together —both internally and externally—to work toward a common goal. Because of this, it’s imperative that people have tools that integrate well with each other and that enable access to the critical data and information needed to drive decisions. Here’s a snapshot of some of the integrations we added this year to make our tools even more flexible for businesses.

• Microsoft Office integration: You can now edit, comment and collaborate on Microsoft Office files using Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. This brings the best of G Suite’s collaboration benefits to Office files, while also eliminating the need to convert file types.

• Enhanced Salesforce integration: We first introduced the Salesforce Data Connector last year. Based on top user requests, we made some improvements this year, including the ability to schedule data refreshes and to allow for more than 2,000 rows of data.

• Dynamic mail in Gmail:  With dynamic mail, you can easily take action directly from within an email message without ever having to leave your inbox—things like RSVPing to an event, filling out a questionnaire or browsing a catalog. This feature is actually what allows you to comment on Google Docs files directly within email (instead of flipping to the app to reply to comment threads). There are a host of ways that businesses, and developers, can use this feature to make email more interactive in their organizations.

Designed with you in mind

Finally, our engineer and design teams worked hard this year to make sure that our apps continue to work for everyone, from anywhere, including new design features to help you stay productive longer. We introduced “Dark mode” in several of our apps like Calendar, Voice, Keep and Tasks to help increase battery life, and spruced up some of our mobile designs in tools like Gmail and Drive and your favorite collaboration tools.

We also baked in more accessibility features into G Suite, including “live edit” comment summaries in Docs. Here’s an overview of available accessibility features in G Suite that you can use.

At the end of the day, people are what drive successful businesses—the real humans behind the scenes. The less time that folks spend focusing on technology, the more time they can lend to solving tough, hairy challenges that affect the bottom line (i.e. the actual work). Learn more about G Suite on our website.