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Smarter Google Forms to save you time

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Google Forms makes it easy to collect information, plan events, solicit feedback, and more. Today, we’re adding new features and using machine learning to make Forms work better for your business. Read on for more details.

Intelligent response validation
When you know the specific type of answer you’re looking for, it’s often helpful to validate responses in Forms. For example, if you’re asking for a website, Forms can double-check that the answer provided is a URL. Following this launch, when we can, we’ll suggest response validation based on the question you ask. If you ask respondents for their age, for instance, we may recommend validating that the answer they provide is a whole number. (Note that this feature is rolling out gradually and may take several weeks to appear in your domain.)

 

Intelligent response validation

Cross-domain file uploads
Oftentimes, when you use Forms, you’re not collecting data from your colleagues you’re gathering information from third parties, customers, and more. To guarantee you get the information you need, we’ll now allow users outside of your domain to upload files as responses to your questions—provided both of your organizations allow cross-domain sharing in Google Drive. Based on usage patterns, total uploads to new forms will be capped at 1GB, with an option to increase that limit to 1TB. Uploads to existing forms will be capped at 1TB.

Preferences
If you use similar settings across all of your forms, you can now save time by assigning default settings to apply to any new forms you create. For instance, you can choose to always collect email addresses, make questions required every time, and assign default quiz point values.

Preferences 1

Preferences 2

“Checkbox grid” questions
Sometimes a question is more complex than multiple choice or checkbox answers alone can satisfy—you need to be able to select multiple options from multiple categories. Going forward, you can use the “Checkbox grid” question type to get the answers you need, like dates and times that work for an upcoming meeting.

Checkbox grid 1

Checkbox grid 2

Section reordering
We heard you loud and clear—you need an easy way to organize (and reorganize) your questions in Forms. In response to your feedback, we’re now making it possible to reorder whole sections quickly and easily.

Reorder 1

Recording section

 

Create better forms, more quickly, with these new and intelligent features in Forms.

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

Editions:
Available to all G Suite editions

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

 

Reference by Google.com

 

 

 

 

New features for your Google Docs and Sheets mobile apps

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Today’s updates to the Google Docs and Sheets mobile apps bring several new and useful features to your Android and iOS devices. Read on for more information.

On your Android phone or tablet, you can now:

Image Manipulation

On your iPhone or iPad, you can now:

iOS Page Setup 2

Download the latest versions of these apps from Google Play or the App Store.

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

Editions:
Available to all G Suite editions

Rollout pace:
Gradual rollout (potentially longer than 3 days for feature visibility)

Impact:
All end users

Action:
Change management suggested/FYI

 

 

 

New built-in Gmail protection to combat malware in attachments

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Today we announced new security features for Gmail customers, including early phishing detection using machine learning, click-time warnings for malicious links, and unintended external reply warnings. In addition, we have also updated our defences against malicious attachments.

Let’s take a deeper look at the new defences against malicious attachments. We now correlate spam signals with attachment and sender heuristics, to predict messages containing new and unseen malware variants. These protections enable Gmail to better protect our users from zero-day threats, ransomware and polymorphic malware.

In addition, we block the use of file types that carry a high potential for security risks including executable and javascript files.

Machine learning has helped Gmail achieve more than 99% accuracy in spam detection, and with these new protections, we’re able to reduce your exposure to threats by confidently rejecting hundreds of millions of additional messages every day.

Constantly improving our automatic protections

These new changes are just the latest in our ongoing work to improve our protections as we work to keep ahead of evolving threats. For many years, scammers have tried to use dodgy email attachments to sneak past our spam filters, and we’ve long blocked this potential abuse in a variety of ways, including:

  • Rejecting the message and notifying the sender if we detect a virus in an email.
  • Preventing you from sending a message with an infected attachment.
  • Preventing you from downloading attachments if we detect a virus.

While the bad guys never rest, neither do we.

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:
All end users

Action:
Change management suggested/FYI

 

Reference by Google.com

 

Insert videos from Google Drive in Google Slides

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Starting today, you can insert and play your Google Drive videos in Google Slides, in addition to videos from YouTube.

Insert Drive video in Slides

Once you’ve added a Drive video to your presentation, you can choose when to start and end it, whether it should autoplay when presenting, and whether it should be muted or play with audio. Simply right-click on the video and select Video options.

video option

If a person viewing your presentation doesn’t have permission to view a video embedded within it, they’ll be prompted to request access.

Note that while you can play Drive videos in Slides on the web and mobile, you can only insert them from the web application. For more details, visit the Help Center.

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

Editions:
Available to all G Suite editions

Reference by Google.com

Creating files from templates now easier in Google Drive

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Since 2015, we’ve been making it easier to focus on your content—not your formatting—with templates in Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Forms. We’ve introduced templates for invoices, pitch decks, and cases studies, as well as templates designed by experts and developed specifically for your organization.
Today, we’re making it easier for users to create files from templates by granting access to templates directly from Google Drive. Instead of navigating to the Docs, Sheets, Slides, or Forms home pages, you can simply go to Drive > New > Google Docs/Sheets/Slides/Forms > From a template. From there, you’ll be directed to the applicable template gallery, where you can select the template of your choice.

Google Drive Templates Submenu

For more details on templates, visit the Help Center.
Launch Details
Release track:
Launching to Rapid release, with Scheduled release coming in three weeks
Editions:
Available to all G Suite editions
Rollout pace:
Gradual rollout (potentially longer than 3 days for feature visibility)
Impact:
All end users
Action:
Change management suggested/FYI

Reference by Google.com

Manage iOS devices without MDM profiles

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G Suite administrators who want their employees to use their own mobile devices at work face a challenge: all Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) solutions available today require an agent or profile to mandate corporate mobile policies, but employees are uncomfortable setting up these agents and profiles on their personal devices. Oftentimes, they choose not to add their corporate accounts to their personal devices at all.

To meet the needs of both admins and employees, today we’re introducing an agentless way to manage iOS devices: Basic Mobile Management.
Basic MM 2
Basic MM 1
Basic Mobile Management allows admins to mandate basic security on iOS devices without requiring users to install an MDM profile. It also relieves admins of the need to set up an Apple Push Certificate and the hassles of renewing that certificate regularly.

With Basic Mobile Management, admins can:
Enforce a screen lock.
Wipe a corporate account (but not the entire device).
View, search, and manage their device inventory.

Basic Mobile Management makes it easier for employees to use their personal devices at work as well, by allowing them to set up their corporate accounts just like they would their personal accounts.

Organizations that require additional restrictions, mobile audit, or application management on iOS devices should continue using the Advanced Mobile Management option.

For more details on Basic Mobile Management and how to get started, check out the Help Center.

Please note that agentless management is only available for iOS devices at this time. Users will still need to install the Device Policy app on their Android devices, even if their admin has chosen Basic Mobile Management.

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

Editions:
Available to all G Suite editions

Rollout pace:
Gradual rollout (potentially longer than 3 days for feature visibility)

Impact:
Admins only

Action:
Admin action suggested/FYI

 

Reference by Google.com

Google Drive sharing notification improvements to support Gmail smart hosting

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Some small but important changes are coming to the way that Google Drive sends notification emails. Your users will not see any visible changes, but if you use Gmail’s advanced smart hosting features, then you may notice a difference in the way new emails are archived or filtered by your mail solutions.

What’s changing:

  • Google Drive will no longer store a ‘courtesy copy’ in the mailbox of the sender. Gmail’s comprehensive mail storage feature will now place a copy of Drive sharing notification emails in the sender’s Sent folder.
  • If you use smart hosting (through an outbound mail server), you can now capture and deliver these emails through your preferred mail gateway.
  • If you previously relied on outbound gateway settings to route Drive notifications, you can now use content compliance rulesor sending routing rules to route these messages, making it consistent with other mail routing features.

What’s not changing:

  • The “from” field is not changing. It will continue to be the sender when the recipient is a group, or drive-shares-noreply@google.comin all other cases, as it is today.
  • The message header fields are not changing. The envelope sender will still be [string]@doclist.bounces.google.com, not the actual account of the sender.
  • Request access notifications will not behave differently.

These changes will roll out to G Suite customers over a few days, starting on November 28, 2016.

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

Editions:
Available to all G Suite editions

Reference by Google.com