Earlier this year, we announced that the appointment slots feature will be replaced by appointment schedules in Google Calendar. Starting this week, only appointment schedules can be created. In a couple of weeks, the appointment slots booking pages will no longer be available. At that time, all new appointments will need to be booked through appointment schedules. | Appointment schedules are available to Google Workspace Business Starter, Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Education Fundamentals, Education Standard, Education Plus, the Teaching and Learning Upgrade, Nonprofits, Google Workspace Individual customers and Google One Premium users. | Visit the Help Center for detailed information about appointment schedules. 

We are making it easier to programmatically import sensitive files to Google Drive with client-side encryption by providing code samples on Github. Eligible admins can apply for beta access to this Drive API feature using this form. | Available to Google Workspace Enterprise Plus; Education Standard and Education Plus.

Previous announcements

Completed rollouts

Currently, a teacher or school administrator can invite a guardian, typically a parent, to receive email summaries about their student’s work in class. These email summaries include a rundown of missing work, upcoming work and class activities, such as recently posted announcements or assignments in Google Classroom. 

Going forward, guardian email summaries will now include links that let guardians preview their student's Classwork pages, including assigned work and attachments provided by the teacher. With this update, guardians can stay up-to-date with what their students are learning. Guardians will not be able to see their student’s grades or submissions, class communication, or other students’ work. Guardians can easily access this page directly from the Classroom email summaries or from the link shared by teachers. 

Admins and end users 

This feature keeps guardians informed about their student’s assignments in class. 

Teachers with the Google Workspace Education Plus edition who already send guardian email summaries will notice those emails automatically start including guardian previewing links. No action is needed to get started. 

• Admins: Admins can turn Guardian Access ON or OFF for their domain and determine whether only admins, or admins and verified teachers, can control guardians accounts and per-class access. If admins choose the latter, verified teachers are able to add or remove guardian accounts for students in their class and determine whether each class will be available for guardian access. Visit the Help Center to learn more about managing guardians in your domain. 
• End users: In classes where you have guardian summaries turned ON, guardians can now preview your classwork page and any classwork assigned to their student(s). You can turn this setting OFF at any time in your Class Settings page.
• Guardians: You have guardian preview capabilities to your student’s Classwork page through direct links in the email summary. Visit the Help Cenet to learn more about guardian email summaries. 

Rollout pace 

• Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains: Gradual rollout (up to 15 days for feature visibility) starting on July 19, 2024 

Availability 

Available for Google Workspace: 

• Education Plus 

Resources 

• Google Workspace Admin Help: Verify teachers and set permissions 
• Google Workspace Admin Help: Manage guardians in your domain
• Google Help: Manage class details and settings 
• Google Help: Guardian email summaries FAQ 
• Google Help: About guardian email summaries 
• Google Help: Get Classroom email summaries (for guardians)

Currently, when there are security policies applied to documents, spreadsheets, presentations or files, users are given no central explanation of which actions, like downloading, making a copy, or external sharing are restricted. 

To improve upon this experience, users who are interacting with policy-protected content, such as those with data loss prevention (DLP) rules or trust rules, will now be proactively informed about what actions are prevented by those policies. 

For example, if a user is interacting with a document affected by DLP-enforced information rights management (IRM) and a Trust Rule, they will see a shield icon, banner, and side panel that informs them of the restricted actions.

End users 

With this update, users will be made aware of which actions they are taking that are disabled on a document, spreadsheet, slide or file due to data protection controls.

• Admins: There is no admin control for this feature. 
• End users: 
• • Any user will be able to see policy visualization if it's active on a document, but the owner of the document is used to determine if it's turned ON. 
  • A shield icon, banner, and side panel will automatically appear when security controls are present. 
  • Visit the Help Center to learn more about the policies that enable Policy Visualization: 
  • • Drive DLP
    • Drive Sharing Settings 
    • Trust Rules 
    • Shared Drives 

During the Open Beta period, this feature will be opt-in only. Customers who fill out this form will see the feature enabled in their specified domains within 7 days of sign-up. Customers may submit feedback here or email it to policy-visualization-open-beta@google.com. 

Policy visualization is enabled when the document, spreadsheet, slides or file owner belongs to the following Google Workspace editions: 

• Business Starter, Standard, Plus 
• Enterprise Starter, Standard, Plus 
• Essentials Starter, Enterprise Essentials, Essentials Enterprise Plus 
• Frontline Starter, Standard 
• Education Fundamentals, Standard, Plus, the Teaching & Learning Upgrade 
• Workspace Individual Subscribers 

Resources 

• Google Help: Drive DLP 
• Google Help: Drive Sharing Settings 
• Google Help: Trust Rules 
• Google Help: Shared Drives