Google has released a few important updates for Google Apps for March. Below is a digest of some key updates and information to efficiently and effectively manage your GAFE domain.
Google Drive’s New UI to Be Default User Setting by May 2015
Last year, Google started the gradual rollout of the new Google Drive UI as the default user experience for Google Apps customers, while retaining the ability to return to the old Drive UI via the Settings drop down. In the first half of May at the earliest, the option to return to the old Drive UI via the Settings drop down will be removed. Learn more.
What Admin Should Do Now:
Advise users to switch to the new Google Drive UI and start familiarizing the new interface.
Changes to Google Drive Sharing Settings
Google Apps admins now have the option in the Admin console to allow Drive content to be viewed by recipients outside of their domain without Google sign-in. This feature will be defaulted off at launch and can be enabled in the Admin console.
Aside from the option to allow external users to preview Drive files, Google Apps admins now have the flexibility to choose Drive sharing permissions based on organizational unit (OU), as you currently can with other apps like Gmail and Calendar.
What Admin Should Do Now:
If you want to enable sharing outside your domain or enable Drive sharing at the OU-level, in the Admin console go to Apps > Google Apps > Drive > Sharing settings.
Feature parity for multi-domain Google Apps instances
For organizations requiring multiple Google Apps domain instances, some of the domain management functionalities that were previously restricted to primary domains only, are now extended to secondary domains to make managing multiple domain instances more seamless.
The following key features can now be configured to secondary domains:
- Custom app URLs – make it easy for people in any of your domains to find your core Google Apps services by creating custom web addresses to each service. For example, mail.primarydomain.com or mail.secondarydomain.com.
- Web address mapping – have your Google Sites appear under custom URLs for all of your domains, such as hr.yourdomain.com, hr.yourdomain.in or hr.yourdomain.fr.
- Group renaming – create a Google Group in a primary domain and move it to a secondary domain. For example, rename the group users@yourdomain.in to users@yourdomain.fr.
What Admin Should Do Now:
Check out the following Help Center links for more information:
Custom app urls
Web address mapping
Group renaming
Google Apps Marketplace Post-Install notifications
Google Apps Admins now have the ability to notify users of a newly installed Marketplace app. These notifications will go to the relevant OU or domain for which the app is installed.
What Admin Should Do Now:
Explore the new functionality.
