Over the past year, Google Workspace rapidly evolved to meet the needs of users as we collectively grappled with remote and hybrid work. First, we launched Google Workspace to commercial customers, which brought together the powerful individual apps people know and love into a single, integrated solution. Then we made Google Workspace available to nonprofits, governments, and schools. And in June, we brought the power of Google Workspace to everyone, enabling more than 3 billion users to transform the way they connect, create, and collaborate. To extend these experiences further, we’ve seen a stunning 4.8 billion apps installed in Google Workspace to date. We’re excited to see so many users personalize their experience by adding third-party apps or by building their own to create a more powerful engine for productivity and collaboration.

As we celebrate the more than 5,300 public apps in the Google Workspace Marketplace that provide users with the opportunity to extend their experience, we’re increasing our investment in the underlying platform. Developers have been able to build applications that integrate with Gmail, Drive, and Docs for years. And today, we’re announcing significant enhancements to the Google Workspace platform by making it just as easy for developers to build applications and integrate with Google Meet, Chat and Spaces.

We’re releasing a new Jira integration for Google Chat and Spaces. This integration enables users to create new tickets quickly, see actionable previews, and monitor issues as they come into the space they’re already using for collaboration.

“Modern work requires people to switch contexts and tools faster than ever before. We believe an open ecosystem and tight integrations among the tools that users rely on every day is vital to their success. Since 2017, our Trello integration with Gmail has been installed by more than 7 million people. Today, we are excited to build on the partnership between Atlassian and Google to propel work collaboration further with the integration of Jira with Google Chat and Spaces,” said Joff Redfern, Chief Product Officer, Atlassian.

As work continues to evolve, we’re especially committed to the concept of collaboration equity: the ability for everyone to participate and drive impact no matter their location, technical ability, language preference, or device. Carrefour Property – Carmila is evolving how they innovate by connecting frontline workers to those in the office with our no-code development platform AppSheet. For example, after discovering a problem, onsite managers previously had to send an email, enter data into a spreadsheet, and sometimes attend a meeting to explain the issue. Now, with AppSheet, they can simply input the data on their phone in a single step, and the team back at headquarters can see and act on the issue while also tracking all the other issues being reported from other locations.

We continue to empower frontline workers and IT teams alike, bringing more flexibility into Google Workspace by integrating AppSheet into Gmail. This new integration allows anyone—regardless of their coding experience—to reclaim time with custom, no-code apps and automations. Budgets and vacation requests can be approved, inventories and asset management systems can be updated, and much more—all with AppSheet and directly from your inbox.

New investments in security

As we continue to deliver delightful new experiences for users, we are keeping security at the forefront; it’s infused in every layer of our product design so that customers have the flexibility and trust needed to operate in a secure environment. To build on this commitment, we’re announcing Google’s new Work Safer offering to help organizations, their employees, and partners collaborate and communicate securely and privately in today’s hybrid work environment. Work Safer will provide companies with access to best-in-class security for email, meetings, and messages, documents, and more. It uniquely brings together the cloud-native, zero-trust solutions of Google Workspace with industry-leading solutions from across Google and its cybersecurity partners, CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks.

To further strengthen security and privacy across the Google Workspace platform, we’re also announcing four key new capabilities:

1. In June, we announced that Client-side encryption (CSE) was available in beta for Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Now we’re bringing CSE to Google Meet, giving customers complete control over encryption keys while helping them meet data sovereignty and compliance requirements. We’re also pleased to announce the beta of our Key Access Service Public APIs, which enables customers to directly manage their encryption keys without the need for a third-party partner.
2. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for Chat is now in beta. This is a continuation of our ongoing commitment to help organizations protect their sensitive data and information from getting into the wrong hands, without impacting the end-user experience. With DLP for Chat, you can enable the power of spontaneous conversation between individuals and teams, while preventing sensitive and confidential information from leaving your organization. Interested customers can sign up for the Client-side encryption and DLP for Chat betas today.
3. Drive labels are now generally available. Organizations are now able to classify files stored in Drive based on their sensitivity level. Labels integrate with Google Workspace Data Loss Prevention, making it easier to manage external sharing, downloading, and printing of sensitive files.
4. We’re rolling out additional protections to safeguard against abusive content and behavior. If a user opens a file that we think is suspicious or dangerous, we’ll display a warning to the user to help protect them and their organization from malware, phishing, and ransomware. This functionality is now available in Google Docs and will be rolling out soon for Google Sheets and Slides.

Fueling the future of work and collaboration

Our mission is to empower everyone with an innovative and seamless experience that gives people—no matter their location or technical ability—the opportunity to drive real impact. At its core, the vision of the Google Workspace platform is to help you build your own innovation momentum, while providing a foundation of security and privacy. I hope you’ll join me at the Google Cloud Next ’21 event where you can learn more about the Google Workspace vision, and even better, see these new experiences in action.