Google has just revealed a host of new features for customers who use G Suite to organize their businesses. The additions are wide-ranging, covering areas such as security and productivity across products like Drive, Gmail, and Hangouts.

Some of the enhancements are available right away for members of the G Suite Enterprise Early Adopter Program (EAP), while some of them won't be rolled out to anyone until a bit later on in the year. Let's take a look at everything Google has announced.

Security

The G Suite Security Center was introduced earlier in the year, and now it's getting a new investigation tool "which adds integrated remediation to the prevention and detection capabilities." It will give administrators the ability to further scrutinize potential breaches and clean up emails or files in the event of an infection. Early adopters can give the tool a try right now.

Data regions

Until now, the data of G Suite customers has been stored in centers around the world, which makes it easier and faster to access. This is important for many multinational companies, but could also be problematic for those with specific data control requirements. For that reason, Google is giving business owners the choice of where the primary data for their G Suite apps is stored. There are three options: globally, in the US, or in Europe. Data regions are already live for G Suite Business and Enterprise customers at no extra cost.

Gmail and Hangouts

Features that will also affect non-G Suite customers are probably of most interest to us here at AP. Smart Compose in Gmail was already released as an experimental feature to the masses along with the web app's redesign. That it will become available to G Suite users "in the coming weeks" suggests that it's ready to shed that "experimental" label and graduate into a full-fledged feature.

In a similar vein, AI has been used for smart replies in Google products such as Inbox and Gmail. The Reply app even works to bring smart replies to notifications from various other apps on Android. Now, the same functionality is coming to Hangouts Chat (which is essentially Google's Slack competitor). Save valuable seconds throughout your day by not having to type short responses to colleagues — also available "in the coming weeks."

Hangouts Meet, the video-based sibling of Chat, will also be getting some new smarts with voice commands coming to select hardware later in the year.

Google Docs and Sheets

Continuing with the AI theme, grammar suggestions in Google Docs are now available to early adopters. Google is using a machine-learning translation-based approach to offer a service similar to Grammarly (which doesn't work in Google Docs, by the way). It's something that will develop and improve over time, so it will be interesting to see if it can become genuinely useful.

In a separate post, it's been announced that Google Sheets is getting some new integrations to make data analysis easier. First of all, data from BigQuery can be dynamically accessed in Sheets through a new beta program. Secondly, companies working with SAP ERP can now directly import data into Sheets for further analysis — no more manually exporting to CSVs.

The overarching aim of these new features is to make G Suite simpler and easier to use, and that's something Google will continue to look at going forward. To read more about these changes and others, check out the blog post in the source link below.

Source: Google