G Suite announcements from Google Next 2018

With over 100 updates from the Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco, it is hard to keep track all of them and find the ones that matter to you.

We have gathered all the G Suite updates from Google Next 2018 and also given our own top 5 announcements!

Our two favourite videos from Next are;

Drive Vision & Roadmap: Intelligent Content Collaboration for Modern Enterprises
https://youtu.be/z1Ob96vJ6PE

What's Next for G Suite: Our Areas of Investment and Upcoming Releases
https://youtu.be/AvEOxA8Y6Tc

Video Transcription

"Hi everybody. Fintan Murphy here from Damson Cloud. I want to talk to you this week about Google Cloud Next, which is Google's customer-facing event that happened last week. And very similar to their Google IO, which is for developers, they announced a lot of stuff for their developer based products. And at the Google Cloud Next event, 2018, they announced a lot of updates to products that were customer facing. So things like G Suite and Chrome on Google Cloud Platform as well. So they announced over 100 announcements or updates and that was across all of their products, which obviously is a huge amount. What I wanted to do was just to focus on the products that are important to our customers which is G Suite and Chrome and maybe pick out my top five from the list.

Now, as I said, there was a lot of announcements so I actually did have to write them all down in order to remember them. But I just wanted to go through what updates there were. And then, as I said, talk about my top five.

So one of the first ones was a new investigative tool for admins, which is being added to the G Suite Security Center. And the G Suite Security Center is only available to Google Enterprise or Google G Suite enterprise or G Suite education customers. So if you're not on one of those plans, if you're on basic or business, you can't sign up for the EAP or the Early Adopter Program for this.

But I do think that it's great to Google are focusing on security that they're increasing their capabilities around security for admins. I do think that, that is a good focus. What the investigation tool allows admins to do is look for user's accounts that have been compromised or tried to stop or delete malicious emails or documents that have been spread around the organization. And that is something that some of our customers have been impacted by.

The next big one was data regions. And data regions have been something that people have been requesting for years from G Suit, particularly now with GDPR we have a lot of customers who require to have their data only held within the European Union. And so now with data regions, you can actually choose which region you would like your data to be held within, and your data won't be backed up or held outside of that region. So that is launching very, very soon, and we'll be keeping people up to date with that. We're going to have links at the bottom of the video to all of the announcements from Google around this.

There were two announcements around Hangouts in Gmail, which are now going to have Smart Reply. You might be familiar with Smart Reply within your mobile device where it will ... Google's AI will suggest maybe a particular response to an email and it's like a quick response that you can just click on it and it will sort of auto predict or fill it in for you. And that's now coming to Hangouts Chat and also coming to Gmail on the web, which is fantastic and some of you may have seen this already.

Another big request from a lot of our customers is some sort of spell checker or grammar checker within Gmail and Google Drive. They're launching it for Google Drive, a grammar and spell checker and it's using Google's AI technology as well. So it's actually going to improve the more that it's used. It isn't available or part of Gmail yet. We don't know if they're maybe eventually going to include it within that. I think that would be a great addition to Gmail. I know a lot of our customers use products like Grammarly in order to have grammar and spellcheck within their Google environments.

A lot of people are talking to us about the new Gmail interface. Many of you have moved to this and the new Gmail interface is now going to be generally available to everybody. So you don't have to ... previously it was just if you're a part of the Early Adopter Program, but now it's available to everyone. So from today, everyone can move over to the new Gmail interface if you wish.

Those of you that use Google Meet hardware, voice commands are coming to Google Meet hardware. So, this is part of Google voice assistant. Some of you may use the Google Home or the Google Assistant on your Android devices. And what you're able to do now, is when you enter a meeting room with measurements that have the Google Meet hardware, is you'll just be able to tell Google to join the Hangout that you have set up for that meeting. And so it's just trying to make it easier for people to get into a meeting and start collaborating with colleagues as quickly as possible.

Okay, the next one, I think is really good. It's Google Cloud search. Google Cloud search is something that's been generally available within G Suite business on G Suite enterprise. What Google have done on the update that they've released is that you can now make available to Google Cloud search third-party data. And I think this is really, really interesting. So what Google or allowing companies to do is to integrate certain systems into Google Cloud search. So that from the cloud search tool, you can actually search all of G Suite and the other products within your organization or business. So, this could be data inside your organization, or maybe some third party products that you're using that the Google have integrated with, or have integrated with cloud search.

If you do have G Suite business or an enterprise and you haven't checked out Google Cloud search, I would recommend that you do that. You can get it from the apps drop down menu.

Another really big announcement is Google Voice for G Suite. Google Voice has been available for consumers in the US and sort of a limited edition of it, outside of the US for years. And many people assumed that it would come to G Suite early on but it didn't. And they have never announced the Early Adopter Program or EAP for Google Voice for business for G Suite. So this is fantastic and we do actually have some customers who are already testing this product out, who are part of the Trusted Tester program. And we've had fantastic feedback with companies of hundreds and hundreds of employees and users using this product. I'm excited to see this being released into the world and for other customers to get to use it. I'm excited to get using it ourselves as well.

Now, the next one isn't really aimed current customers of G Suite. But what Google have done is they've announced a standalone version of Drive Enterprise. What this means is for customers that maybe have already heavily invested in Microsoft or other email platforms, but would like the collaboration aspect of G Suite and Drive, they can now sign up to G Suite for the drive aspect only.

Okay, this is one of my big five, avoiding conflict within Google Drive when editing Microsoft Office documents. What Google have announced is that if you're using the Google Drive files stream tool And you're editing Microsoft Office documents, there is now a feature that will avoid conflicts. So that if you're editing at same time as somebody else, it will avoid you conflicting with someone else in terms of the changes that you're making. So it will tell you when it's safe to make the edits. This isn't released yet, but it's coming in the next month or so.

I want to quickly talk about a couple of add ons that are coming, or features that are coming to Hangouts and Calendar. There're not released yet, but they're just some ones that were sort of announced or mentioned on the roadmap. So, automatic room release. This has been a huge challenge for a lot of customers, where someone will book a meeting room and then the meeting will get cancelled, but the room will actually still be unavailable. So it will still be part of that meeting that actually no one is attending anymore. There's also going to be the ability to see more insight into your room usage. So, yourself as an admin can see how many times people are booking a room and actually using that room.

They've announced greater calendar interoperability with Microsoft Exchange. So that now you can actually see and propose a new time for resource bookings within Google and it will work or be interoperable with exchange.

Live streaming is coming to Google Hangouts. This is going to be for enterprise only. We've got a Hangout adaptive layout is coming as well. This was really interesting to see demonstrated. It's kind of got four split screens rather than kind of the way it is now where the rest of the people are tiny.

Interoperability with other video conferencing systems. Pexip and Google have worked together to create interoperability with Hangouts with all of the other major video conferencing systems such as Cisco, Skype for Business. If you get the Pexip integration, then you can send a Hangout invite to someone who's on Skype and they can join their Skype call, you can join your Hangout video call and both parties can use the separate systems that their businesses have.

Google Meet and Jamboard, for those of you who use Jamboard or whatever, are kind of coming together. There's going to be greater integration between the two of those as well. Within Google Sheets, there is some really big updates. BigQuery Data Connector for Google Sheets. SAP has announced an integration with Google Sheets. Salesforce have announced an integration with Google Sheets. We've got Macros, Grouping Rows, Checkboxes, these are all some recent ones that have come out. Box, Dropbox and Egnyte have all announced integrations with Google Drive and Google Sheets as well.

So, to recap. One, data regions. Two, Google Voice. Three, possibly the Cloud Search. Four, avoiding conflicts in Microsoft Office using the Google Drive files dream tool, a bit of a mouthful. And number four, the security investigation tool and generally security center.

If there are any ones that you thought that I missed, or maybe you have a different top five please, let me know in the comments below.

I'm excited to see where Google is going this year. As I said, there's been so many updates. It's really exciting. It's exciting to see so much focus on collaboration and security and many of these challenges that our customers have had with the product over the years.

So that's it for me. I hope you enjoyed this update."