SaaS Updates Summary: July 19 – July 23

Like emojis? You can use the latest ones now in Gmail. Plus, a big one from a security standpoint—you can block another user in Google Drive if you don’t want that person to share items with you. It was a big week, so buckle your seatbelts and dive into the links.

Updates to Google Workspace Public Status Dashboard and Service Status Alerts
Google Workspace Updates | Google is introducing a new Public Status Dashboard experience for Google Workspace.Specifically, you can now configure the rule to also deliver Apps outage alerts to the Alert Center, and you can retrieve the alerts using the Alert Center API.

Hangouts to Google Chat Upgrade Beginning August 16th, With Option To Opt-Out
Google Workspace Updates | Beginning August 16, 2021, Google will start upgrading users who have the “Chat and classic Hangouts” setting selected to “Chat preferred,” unless you explicitly opt out. Users who already have “Chat only”, “Chat preferred”, or “Classic Hangouts Only” selected, or users with both services turned off will not be affected.

Fundamental Data Regions Now Available to More Google Workspace Customers
Google Workspace Updates | Data regions gives you the ability to choose where covered data for select Google Workspace apps is stored at rest. The existing data regions feature, now known as Enterprise data regions, offer a full range of features to Google Workspace Enterprise Plus and Education Plus customers.

Bulk Convert Classic Sites to New Sites Using the Classic Sites Manager
Google Workspace Updates | Beginning today, you can now bulk convert Classic Sites to new Sites using the Classic Sites Manager. Google hopes this highly-requested feature will make it easier to prepare your organization for the migration completion.

Block Shares From Another User in Google Drive
Google Workspace Updates | If blocked, the user will not be able to share any Drive items with you, and items owned by the user will not be able to be shared with you or be shown when you’re browsing Google Drive. In addition, your files will not be available to the user you’ve blocked, even if you’ve previously shared items with them.

Select Multiple Tabs in Google Sheets and Perform Basic Actions on the Selection
Google Workspace Updates | Now you can select multiple tabs in Google Sheets and perform basic actions on the selection (such as moving the tabs together, deleting, duplicating, copying, coloring, or hiding). Work in Google Sheets with confidence and make workflows faster as you perform basic actions on more than one sheet at a time.

Image Placeholders Make It Easy To Work as a Team With Images in Slides Themes and Layouts
Google Workspace Updates | Now when you create a theme in Slides, you can add image placeholders to your layouts. Slides editors can then easily replace these image placeholders with the desired images.

Easily Collaborate and Share Slide Presentations With Side-by-Side Viewing in Google Chat
Google Workspace Updates | In Google Chat, you can now open and edit a Slide presentation in a side-by-side view. By enabling you and your collaborators to directly edit presentations without leaving Chat, we hope to make it easier to transform your ideas into impact.

For last week’s SaaS updates (and beyond), click here for our archive.