Google Workspace Changes

The 'Manage Google Meet hardware and calendars' privilege will no longer grant broad access to all organizational calendars.

To enhance security and clarity, the 'Manage Google Meet hardware and calendars' privilege will cease to provide full read/write access to all Google Calendars across the organization, effective October 15, 2025. This update ensures that administrators solely responsible for Meet hardware management will not automatically have access to sensitive calendar data. While the privilege will still enable assigning calendars to Meet hardware devices, any admins requiring the previous level of calendar control must be separately granted the 'Manage Calendars' privilege before the specified date.

Ask Gemini in Meet provides a personal meeting assistant to summarize discussions, identify action items, and catch up on missed content.

Ask Gemini in Meet is being introduced for select Google Workspace customers to enhance the meeting experience. This feature allows users to summarize ongoing discussions, identify key takeaways and action items, and catch up on content if they joined late (provided "Take Notes for Me" was enabled). User interactions with Ask Gemini are private, and it generates insights using meeting captions, Google Workspace resources, and Google search. No meeting data is stored after the meeting ends. The feature is initially available on desktop, supports English, and will not be available in breakout rooms. Admins have controls to manage access, and meeting hosts can disable it for participants.

Google Meet links will now be added to the location field for invitations sent to users of other calendar apps (e.g., Outlook), and Google Calendar will detect Meet links from external invitations.

With this update, Google Meet links will automatically appear in the location field when a Google Calendar user invites someone using a different calendar application, such as Microsoft Outlook. This change aims to simplify joining Meet conferences for external users by ensuring the link is easily visible and not overlooked in event details. Additionally, Google Calendar will now intelligently detect Google Meet links embedded in the description or location fields of invitations received from other calendar apps, further enhancing the ease of joining meetings and fostering seamless collaboration across different platforms.

Google Chat apps will now automatically install into future conversations after initial user installation, removing the need for manual re-installation.

Google Chat is introducing a new feature that will automatically add Chat apps to future conversations once they have been installed by a user. Previously, users were required to manually install a Chat app into every space, group chat, and direct message. This update streamlines the process, allowing users to initiate actions with an app, such as creating a poll, and have the app automatically available in subsequent conversations without needing to reinstall it. Admins can still control app installation permissions and can also choose to pre-install apps for their organization.

When duplicating Google Calendar events, the associated Google Meet conference will no longer be copied to enhance meeting privacy.

To enhance meeting privacy, when users copy or duplicate events in Google Calendar, the associated Google Meet conference will no longer be automatically copied. This ensures that Meet access and any meeting notes remain exclusively tied to the original event and its attendees. If a user wishes to participate in the same Meet conference for the duplicated event, they will need to manually copy the Meet code separately. This change also improves security and reliability by keeping the meeting code unique to the original event, reducing ambiguity and ensuring information is shared only with correct participants.

Gemini summaries are now displayed directly on the Home page in Google Drive for suggested Docs, Sheets, Slides, and PDFs.

Users can now view Gemini-generated summaries directly within the suggested files section on the Google Drive Home page. These summaries will appear for selected Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and PDF files in the suggested list. Users have the option to click a ‘See more’ button that appears on hover to view a more in-depth analysis or to ask Gemini follow-up questions about the file in the Gemini side panel, enhancing quick understanding and interaction with document content.

Google Workspace is implementing a Shared Signals Framework (SSF) Receiver to enhance security by ingesting Continuous Access Evaluation Profile (CAEP) signals, currently in closed beta.

The Shared Signals Framework (SSF) is an initiative by the OpenID Foundation to standardize cross-system communication between security platforms, facilitating the sharing of security insights and events. Google Workspace is supporting this initiative by implementing an SSF Receiver to ingest Continuous Access Evaluation Profile (CAEP) signals. This feature is currently available in a closed beta for Google Workspace customers and interested partners. An example use case for this enhancement is session revocation, where a signal to revoke a session will automatically invalidate the user's session, thereby reducing the window of access for potentially compromised users. This improves security by enhancing cross-system communication and accelerating responses to security incidents.

Google Sheets introduces a new condensed view for version history, displaying only rows with changes for quicker edit identification.

Google Sheets is rolling out a new condensed view for its version history feature. By default, this view will now only display rows containing cells that have undergone changes in the selected version. This enhancement aims to help users identify relevant edits within a spreadsheet more quickly and efficiently. Users can revert to the previous full version history view by selecting the 'Show unmodified rows' checkbox, which will highlight changes across the entire sheet.

Google Chat now offers real-time push notifications for reactions on messages to keep users updated.

Google Chat users can now receive real-time push notifications for reactions on their messages. This feature helps users stay informed about engagement with their messages and ensures they don't miss important updates. Reactions, such as emojis like a smiley face or a thumbs up, allow for easier conveyance of information or sentiment, and now message authors will be aware of these reactions without manually checking the conversation.

Users can now utilize Gemini to refine text within text boxes in Google Slides using pre-set options or custom prompts.

Google Slides now integrates Gemini to enable users to refine text directly within text boxes. With just a few clicks, users can leverage Gemini to rephrase, shorten, formalize, or bulletize existing text using optimized pre-set options. Additionally, users have the flexibility to enter their own prompts for text refinement, helping to quickly polish slide content and improve its readability and consumability.

'Help me create' in Google Vids now includes support for Google Slides presentations as reference materials for video drafts.

The 'Help me create' feature in Google Vids has been updated to include support for Google Slides presentations as reference materials. Users can now incorporate their Google Slides when constructing prompts, which will lead to improved Slides analysis and content integration into the generated video drafts. This includes pulling text and visual content like relevant Slides, images, and text, in addition to suggested scripts, AI voiceovers, and music.

Google Drive on Android devices revamps the scanned document editing experience with improved adjustment options and UI.

Google Drive on Android devices is revamping its scanned document editing experience. Users will now benefit from updated adjustment options, offering a more seamless and improved user experience. Enhancements include larger page previews for detailed viewing, an improved UI layout with easy access to page deletion and retake functions, and a new Material 3 page thumbnail carousel for quick document skimming and drag-and-drop page reordering. These updates allow for better cropping, rotation, color adjustments, and shadow erasure.

Google Drive inventory reporting now supports daily exports of Drive data assets to BigQuery, in open beta.

Google Drive Inventory reporting now supports scheduling a daily export of your Drive data assets to BigQuery, in addition to the existing weekly cadence. Compared to APIs, exporting inventory reports to BigQuery empowers administrators to understand their data more deeply, providing insights into how their data is classified, accessed, and used. Understanding these metrics can help admins to identify security risks, ensure compliance with regulatory requirements, and more.

Developers can now build Google Chat apps using the Workspace add-on framework for building single apps across multiple Workspace applications.

The ability for developers to build Google Chat apps using the Workspace add-on framework is now generally available. This framework allows developers to build and maintain a single application that functions across various Workspace apps, including Gmail, Calendar, Drive, and Chat. This simplifies development, administration, and end-user experience by enabling features like link previews, task automation, external service notifications, and combining third-party data within Workspace.

Audit log changes for Google Meet hardware settings will now be found under "Application setting" instead of "Chromebox for meetings device setting change".

Starting August 7, 2025, audit logs for specific Google Meet hardware settings like 'Release channel' and 'Alert recipients' will transition from being logged under 'Chromebox for meetings device setting change' to 'Change Application Setting,' 'Create Application Setting,' or 'Delete Application Setting.' This update is part of Google's effort to remove outdated product references and streamline the audit log experience. By August 28, 2025, these logs will solely appear under the new 'Application setting' categories.