When auto-provisioning is enabled for a supported third-party application, any users created, modified, or deleted in G Suite are automatically added, edited, or deleted in the third-party application as well. This feature is highly popular with admins, as it removes the overhead of managing users across multiple third-party SaaS applications.

We’ve heard continued positive feedback from admins, so we’re adding auto-provisioning support for eight new applications: Amazon Web Services, DocuSign, Evernote, GoToMeeting, Office 365, SAP Cloud Platform Identity Authentication, Sugar, and Zendesk.

Customers subscribed to G Suite Education, G Suite Business, and G Suite Enterprise editions can enable user auto-provisioning in all supported applications. Customers on G Suite Basic, G Suite Government, and G Suite Nonprofit can configure auto-provisioning for up to three applications from the supported list. For more information on how to set up auto-provisioning, check out the Help Center.

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

Editions:

• G Suite Basic, Government, and Nonprofit customers can enable auto-provisioning for up to three applications
• G Suite Education, Business, and Enterprise customers can enable auto-provisioning for all supported applications 

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

Impact:
Admins only

Action:
Admin action suggested/FYI

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

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Controlling the settings for your domain, and the organizational units (OUs) within it, is a critical part of being a G Suite admin. We’re now making that easier with changes to the apps settings list page in the Admin console.

Navigating to Apps > G Suite will now list out your domain’s available G Suite core apps with a cleaner look and feel. Also on this page you’ll see a new panel on the left-hand side where you can toggle between app management at the domain or OU level.



If you select an OU in the left panel and then hover over an app, you'll see two options:

• Off (override): This option turns off the app for the OU, overriding the ON/OFF setting made at the parent organization level.
• Inherit: This option uses the ON/OFF setting designated at the OU’s parent organization level.

Alternatively, if you click into the details page of a specific app and go to adjust the ON/OFF setting to “On for some organizations,” you’ll see a new page layout that shows the service status with the option to change the setting. From there, you can easily click in the top left of the screen to navigate back to any of the previous pages in the Admin console.



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

Editions:
Available to all G Suite editions

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

Impact:
Admins only

Action:
Admin action suggested/FYI
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We recently introduced the new Google Calendar experience on the web, including the ability to add more structured data about your buildings and resources. We’re now making it easier to add and edit that information with updates to the existing Calendar Resources API, as well as adding two new APIs: Buildings and Features.

G Suite admins can also use these APIs to keep resource and building information in Google Calendar up to date and in sync with other systems used for facility management.

For more information on the Calendar Resources APIs, check out the API documentation and Help Center links below.

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 only

Action:
Admin action suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center: Create buildings, features, and resources
The Keyword: Time for a refresh: meet the new Google Calendar for web
G Suite Updates: Introducing the new Calendar Resource API
G Suite Admin SDK > Directory API: Resources.calendars
G Suite Admin SDK > Directory API: Resources.features
G Suite Admin SDK > Directory API: Resources.buildings

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With Single-Sign-On (SSO), users can access all of their enterprise cloud applications—including the Admin console for admins—after signing in just one time. Google supports the two most popular enterprise SSO standards, OpenID Connect and SAML, and there are more than 800 applications with pre-integrated SSO support in our third-party apps catalog already.

We’re now adding SAML integration for 11 additional applications: &frankly, Bonusly, HelloSign, Salsify, Sequr, Small Improvements, SpaceIQ, StatusHub, Symantec Web Security Service (WSS), ThousandEyes, and PurelyHR.

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

Rollout pace:
Gradual rollout (potentially longer than 3 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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Update (January 25, 2018): In response to your feedback, we’re rolling this feature back and will re-launch once we’ve made some improvements. Please stay tuned to the G Suite Updates blog to learn when the feature is once again available.

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The Google Apps Device Policy app enforces your organization’s security policies on employees’ managed Android devices, protecting them and making them safer. If a security policy is violated, it’s especially important to ensure that corporate data isn’t accessible on that device until it’s once again compliant.



With that in mind, the Device Policy app will now disable access to non-critical apps* on any work profile or company-owned Android device that it determines is non-compliant. Users will see a notification informing them that their device violated a security policy and some apps may be disabled. Those apps will be re-enabled when their device complies with all of the organization’s security policies.

*Non-critical apps are any apps that aren’t required for a device to function. For example, Dialer is a critical app, but Gmail is a non-critical app.

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:
All end users

Action:
Change management suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center: Protect corporate data on mobile devices
Help Center: Mobile audit log
Help Center: Automate mobile management tasks with rules
Help Center: Use the Google Apps Device Policy app on an Android device
Help Center: Assist users of managed Android devices


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Google Mobile Management allows G Suite admins to control access to company data on managed devices directly from the Admin console. With this launch, we’re giving admins increased power to protect their organizations’ data by preventing their users from syncing corporate data on jailbroken iOS devices.

Admins can enable this feature in the Admin console under Device Management > Advanced Settings > Security. Note that this feature is off by default and requires an organization to have Advanced Mobile Management for iOS enabled in order to turn on.


For this setting to work, users need to have the Google Device Policy app installed. Once the feature is turned on, users who don’t have the Device Policy app on their device will be prompted to install it. Once installed, the app will check if the device is jailbroken regularly, and notify the user if they pass or fail that check.


This setting should help G Suite admins and end users keep their organization’s data secure. For more details, visit the Help Center.

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

Editions:
Available to all G Suite editions

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

Impact:
Admins only

Action:
Admin action suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center: Apply advanced settings


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We’re making some changes to the menus and toolbars in Google Docs and Slides on the web. These changes will make it easier to find certain items and increase consistency across Docs and Slides. Among other things, you’ll notice the following:

• In Docs and Slides, “Lists” in the Format menu has been renamed “Bullets and numbering.”
• In Docs and Slides, “Show spelling suggestions” has been renamed “Spelling” and moved from the View menu to the Tools menu.
• In Docs, “Document outline” has been renamed “Show document outline” and moved from the Tools menu to the View menu.
• In Slides, “Import slides” has been removed from the Insert menu.

See below for some examples of the revamped toolbars and menus.

Launch Details
Release track: 
Launching to Rapid Release, with Scheduled Release coming on January 4th, 2018

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


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We know how valuable templates can be to a company—they save employees’ precious time, ensure that their work product looks professional, and increase brand consistency across their materials. That’s why we’ve spent the last several months working with partner experts to develop templates in four new categories:

1. Project Management in Sheets, in partnership with Smartsheet


2. Sales in Docs, in partnership with PandaDoc



3. Human Resources (HR) in Docs, in partnership with Zenefits

4. Freelancer Engagement in Docs, in partnership with Upwork



At the moment, these templates are only available in English and on the web.

While the new templates above are English only, our existing templates are now available in several additional languages, including Hindi (hi), German (de), Indonesian (in), Japanese (ja), Dutch (nl), and Chinese (zh-CN). These localized templates will be available in Docs, Sheets, and Slides on the web.

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

More Information
Help Center: Create a file from a template


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Earlier this year, we announced additions to Google+ metrics to better understand user activity and community-level metrics. We’re continuing this effort to manage Google+ communities by introducing Google+ community metrics, surfaced in two places: the Admin console and in the Google+ community dashboard.

Metrics for community owners and moderators

First, community owners and moderators can now see new membership and engagement statistics about their community using the new "Insights" tab. If they’d like more information on a particular metric, mousing over it will provide additional context to help with interpreting the data.



To access these insights, an owner or moderator can click on the “Manage” button (previously the “Moderate” button) and select the “Insights” tab.

Please note, this dashboard will only be available to owners and moderators of Google+ communities. For more information on moderating a Google+ community, please visit the Help Center.

Communities Report for admins

For G Suite administrators, we've also added the ability to see all communities owned by members of your organization, sortable by metrics such as total members, active members, number of posts recently made, and more. In this report, which can be found in the Admin console by going to Reports > Apps > Google+ > Communities report, you’ll also be able to see the community’s “Visibility,” indicating whether or not it’s restricted to your domain.



You can choose to view either the last seven or 30 days worth of data.

As with our previous reporting additions, these metrics are available in both the Admin console and Reports API.

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 (Community insights metrics)
Admins only (Communities admin report)

Action:
Change management suggested/FYI

More Information
Help Center: Moderate a community
Help Center: Google+ community metrics

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Earlier this year, we launched Drive File Stream and Backup and Sync to help users in your organization more easily access files on their desktop computers. Many of you asked for a way to keep track of the changes to those two products. In response to your feedback, we’re now publishing regular release notes for both Drive File Stream and Backup and Sync on the Help Center. These release notes should help you stay on top of the additions and improvements made to each new version of the two products. We’ll continue to announce major changes on the G Suite Updates Blog as well.


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