Top Google Apps Issues in April

Google Business Apps are a powerful productivity suite in use by over 5 million businesses around the world. The flexibility to create, share and collaborate from almost anywhere on any device has contributed to the massive popularity of the service.  The strength in Google Apps is that it’s a constantly evolving service. So known issues are caught early, workarounds are found, and the root issues don’t stay with us for too long.

If you’re using the service for your business it’s important to be aware of the issues at any given time, and have the information to get around them if you’re being affected. In this post we’re going to look at the most significant issues today, along with Googles recommended workarounds to get you back to productivity in no time.

All day calendar events blocking out schedules from midnight to midnight in UTC zones. 

If you’re affected by this issue, the simple work around is to create a timed event instead. Set the room invite for 8 hours instead of all day, or within whatever exact time frame the event will run for.

In Google Drive, sometimes a gallery submission template won’t be listed. Trying to resubmit the document causes an error where the template already exists. 

This is an annoying bug, but one that’s easily rectified. Users can create a copy of the document to get around this, setting the visibility options for people within their domain, or for public viewing if relevant.

Users may notice that non embedded fonts won’t display correctly in PDF documents. 

This is not so much an issue, but a limitation of the format. To display non-English fonts, users should ensure that they are embedded in the PDF before trying to view them in Google Drive.

Problems with ownership transfers in Google Docs. 

Google Apps are great for collaborating, but sometimes ownership transfers fail, or not all documents are transferred. If you receive a failure notification, try resubmitting the transfer in a few hours.

The Google+ Hangouts app crashes on iOS when initiating a voice or video hangout.

 This is a known issue that is caused when your administrator has disabled voice or video hangouts. Google is working on a fix to prevent the crash. If you’re supposed to have access to these services, let your administrator know.

Google+ Hangouts iOS app won’t load beyond the startup screen.

This is an issue occurring when your administrator has turned off conversation history by default. iOS users will need to start a conversation from the Hangouts web interface and turn on conversation history before reloading the Hangout in the iOS app. You could also talk to your administrator about changing the default settings to resolve this issue.

Many users of google apps are accessing the service on BYOD (bring your own device) hardware or with third party mail clients. Issues with device and third party software are more common due to compatibility issues.

The current known issues and fixes are listed below.

Microsoft Exchange accounts should not be added to your google sync profile. 

Although it’s possible to do it, this process is unsupported and may cause sending and receiving failures.

‘Send As’ addresses don’t show in Outlook 2010 until the program has been restarted twice.

A strange glitch caused in part by compatibility issues with Outlook. If you’re trying to use new addresses to send from on your Google account, you’ll need to first restart Outlook 2010, wait for Google Apps Sync to complete, and then restart the program again before you can use the new addresses.

Problems sending to contacts in Outlook 2013. 

Again, this is a compatibility issue with Microsoft Outlook. Users who are adding contacts with the ‘Add to Outlook Contacts’ option will experience sending failures when using contacts from their Outlook Address Book. Users receiving the error ‘Can't determine recipient email: '3002001f:SMTP' '39fe001f:(null)' '3003001f:undisclosed-recipient’ in their Google Apps log will need to delete and recreate the contact in Outlook. Another less convenient workaround is to manually type the email address when sending to the affected contact.

Although a powerful business tool, Google Apps are not impervious to issues. However, the biggest strength in a cloud based service is the ability to update things on the fly. Google has shown an excellent track record of getting on top of issues and the interim workarounds allow users to get on with their work, with very little distraction.

To stay on top of all of the Google Apps known issues, visit the Google Support page.