G Suite Admins

Update Roundup: Top 4 New Features for Google Apps Admins in June

Written by Joey Allen (G Suite Apps Admin) | June 27, 2016

Here at Coolhead Tech, we like to help you stay up to date with Google Apps and other cloud solutions for businesses. In this article, we'll be discussing the latest Google Apps New Features for Apps Admins in particular.    Non-Admins, be careful: there's a lot of tech talk after this point but don't worry your update roundup is next.

 

1.  Google Plus Profile Management by OU

Initially, the Apps Admin console could only create Google+ profiles in one of two ways: on an individual basis, or across an entire organizational unit. Creating profiles for multiple individuals or just a portion of an OU wasn't easily doable, since the limited options basically required you to create individual profiles one at a time if they didn't all fit neatly into one OU.

Fortunately, one of the Google Apps New Features this month is the ability to mass-create and mass-delete Google+ profiles. You can create as many profiles as you want much more easily, and deleting them is just a matter of checking names on a list and clicking "Delete".

 

2. GADS Can Sync LDAP Fields For Use With SAML SSO

GADS, or Google Apps Directory Sync, allows users to sync an Apps domain's data with an LDAP directory server. LDAP, or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, maps files, organizations and individuals on a network. This means you'll be able to more easily map users, groups and other contacts much more easily. This sync uses LDAP data, but makes no changes to the LDAP servers.

The added features offered in the latest update allows users to use more LDAP attributes alongside SAML SSO and Google Apps profiles. In layman's terms, this means more in-depth user profiles and user credentials.

Finally, the update also brought a series of bugfixes to GADS. These bugs included group permissions being reset, City not being synced properly, and group descriptions with multiple lines not displaying properly.

 

3. MDM Consolidated Insights in Google Admin Console

Mobile Audit launched a while back, but this latest update has added a new feature to it: Insights. Mobile Audit itself allowed admins to get security reports on the activities of devices in their domain, and Insights now allows those actions to be done more easily from Device Management in the Admin console. This means admins can now monitor devices for behavior like system updates, failed entries, suspicious activity, device compromise, and other concerns. The list of what Mobile Audits can detect is actually quite a long one, but it is worth noting that Android devices benefit from much more in-depth monitoring than iOS devices.

On a surface level, adding Insights to the Apps Admin console might seem like a minor update. Technically, it is- but making mobile audits easier to access and perform can only mean good things for Apps Admins all over.

 

4. Audit End-User SAML Events Via Admin Console

One of Google Apps New Features pays attention to a particular XML standard: SAML. Security Assertion Markup Language is used by secure domains to exchange authentication and user authorization data. With the Admin Console, you can audit these events, allowing you to see when they're created, modified and deployed by other Apps administrators. This lets you keep better track of things like user logins and runtime errors.

 

Get best practices for managing IT in the cloud with our new e-book for Google Apps Administrators:

 

For more on Google Apps New Features, stay tuned to Coolhead Tech. In addition to Apps Admin concerns, we also cover consumer-end cloud software, advanced digital marketing and some general tech topics. To get a better idea of who we are and what we do, read over our blog for more posts like these.

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