Over the past few weeks, you may have noticed a new format to our launch announcements on this blog. Based on customer feedback, we tried to:

• Use headings to make our posts more scannable 
• Reorder information to call out what’s most important for you to know. 

We hope that this new formatting saves you time and makes our launch announcements more useful for you. If you haven’t already provided feedback, we’d love to get your thoughts on the new style. Please let us know what you think of the changes by filling out this form.


Thanks, The G Suite Launch Announcement team

We have updated our plans for Google Sites and want to let you know two key things:

1. We're going to build more enterprise-focused features into new Sites (including ones from classic Sites): We listened to extensive feedback from customers and have identified a number of features in classic Sites that are particularly valuable to larger organizations. We plan to add comparable functionality for those features, along with new and unique features, to new Sites. We believe these will help you use new Sites in different and exciting ways, while making the transition process to new Sites easier and more streamlined. See below for more details on specific features. 


2. The final date to transition from classic Sites to new Sites will be the end of 2021: Also based on customer feedback, we realize that classic Sites still offers unique value to our enterprise customers today. While we add more of the requested features to new Sites, we will continue to invest in maintaining core classic Sites functionality until end of year 2021. 

More features coming to new Sites 
Here are some examples of commonly requested functionality that you will see in new Sites in the future:
Create richer, more customized sites: 

• New site themes so your sites can match your company look, feel, and brand. 
• Improved text controls to provide you with a greater choice of fonts, colors, styles, and more. 
• Standard templates from Google to help you quickly create common types of sites (such as team sites, project sites, and events sites). 
• Custom templates to provide simple access to starter websites specific to your domain. 
• Better integration with other G Suite products so you can easily embed content in Sites. 
• New API capabilities, including Apps Script support, so you can automate and manage sites. 
• New page elements, like tables of contents and image carousels. 

Create and manage larger sites: 

• Additional functionality and controls to help you create and manage larger sites. 
• Increased size limits so you can build larger sites. 
• Ability to see what’s changed between the previous published version and current draft of a site, so you can make more informed publishing decisions. 
• Version history so you can see and restore previous versions. 
• Richer and more comprehensive search from within a site. 
• Google Vault support for content from new Sites. 

Transitioning from classic Sites to new Sites 
In 2016 we announced a new version of Google Sites, and in 2017 we announced that new Sites would eventually become the only version of Google Sites. We’ve heard feedback that classic Sites remains valuable for our customers. While we work to add some of the features detailed above, we plan to maintain core classic Sites functionality. This will extend the deadline to transition from classic to new Sites, which we detailed in this post, to the end of 2021.

We continue to have dedicated engineers maintaining core functionality, but classic Sites was originally built many years ago and its infrastructure and integrations with other products and gadgets are quickly becoming outdated. As a result, we cannot guarantee all features will continue to work as they currently do.

As we make progress along the roadmap and expand the features and functionality of new Sites, we plan to improve our migration tools and processes to help make the migration from classic Sites to new Sites easier.

We’ll provide more updates as work progresses. Keep an eye on the G Suite Updates blog for details of these announcements.


Try new Sites today  The new Google Sites has a simple interface that makes it easy for anyone to create functional and attractive sites. Many of our customers already prefer it to create common types of sites, including team sites, product sites, and event sites. If you want to try it:

• As an Admin, you can turn new Sites on for your organization. 
• If it’s available for your organization, you can go to sites.google.com/new to create a site. 
• If you own an eligible site in classic Sites can use the automatic site converter to migrate it to new Sites. 

Stay up to date with G Suite launches

• Get G Suite product update alerts by email
• See the G Suite launch release calendar
• Subscribe to the RSS feed of these updates

We’ve just updated the “What’s new in G Suite?” Help Center article to include recent launches. The article has a list of all the G Suite launches from the past six months. You can filter by product or search by keyword to find and learn about any launch.

Feedback? Let us know.

This post in other languages: Español | Français | 日本語 | Português

More than a decade ago, we introduced Gmail—our first cloud-native productivity app—to help make email safer and easier for everyone. Since then, we pioneered more ways for teams to collaborate in real-time with products like Google Calendar, Docs, Drive and Hangouts. Together, these apps make up G Suite, our set of intelligent, secure productivity and collaboration tools.

We’ve brought businesses more than a dozen new G Suite services to help them reimagine how they work, including powerful video conferencing (Hangouts Meet), secure team messaging (Hangouts Chat) and enterprise-grade search capabilities (Cloud Search). We’ve also infused our products with advanced artificial intelligence to make it easier to respond to emails, gather insights from data and protect against phishing attacks before they happen.

Today, more than four million organizations use G Suite to collaborate efficiently and securely, and analysts have taken notice. IDC’s Wayne Kurtzman notes, "Google has established G Suite as a secure, enterprise-ready, AI–powered productivity and collaboration platform. With its broad set of capabilities, G Suite offers a strong value proposition to customers.”


For existing G Suite Basic or Business edition customers on the Flexible Plan, the new list prices will go into effect on April 2, 2019*. For customers on the Annual Plan, the new prices will go into effect the first time their plan renews on or after April 2, 2019*. These changes will not impact current contracts or any renewal events prior to April 2, 2019*.

Additionally, for those Basic and Business Edition customers who receive their bill from Google, we’ll send an email with details specific to their domains no later than February 28, 2019. Any customer that licenses G Suite through a reseller should hear from their partners directly regarding the new pricing, or they can reach out to their partners proactively.

We are grateful for the many businesses that use G Suite to empower their teams to work collaboratively, and we remain committed to expanding its functionality to help our customers succeed. Feel free to reference this edition guide to learn more about each offering.

*Note: For customers who sign up for G Suite Basic or Business editions from February 1, 2019 through April 1, 2019, the pricing changes will go into effect starting on June 1, 2019.

Launch release calendar
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What’s changing 

We’re connecting Sheets and BigQuery to make it easier to analyze and share data. The Big Query data connector will help you:

• Collaborate with partners, analysts or other stakeholders in a familiar spreadsheet interface
• Ensure a single source of truth for data without having to create additional CSV exports
• Streamline reporting and dashboarding workflows

Who’s impacted End users

Why you’d use it We built BigQuery to help analysts make sense of large datasets—now it’s easier for employees and team members outside of data analyst functions to access and analyze data. By bringing these two tools together, collaborators and other stakeholders can view up to 10,000 rows of data from BigQuery in an easy, familiar interface. This makes collaboration and insight sharing easier, enabling faster decision making.

How to get started: 

• Admins: No Action 
• End users: Here’s how to get your data from BigQuery and analyze it in Sheets: 
• From the Menu, select Data > Data Connectors > BigQuery 
• Use the Explore feature 
• Create Charts 
• Create Pivot Tables 

To check key permissions for the BigQuery data connector see here.

Additional details Anyone you share the spreadsheet with will see the data contained in the sheet. Only those with edit access in Sheets and view access to the BigQuery table have the ability to refresh the dataset.

For key permissions for the BigQuery data connector see here.
As always, use share permissions to control who can view, edit or share your data.

In the coming weeks, you’ll be able to use tools like Apps Script and the macro recorder to schedule automatic updates within Sheets to the connected BigQuery data. For example, you can automatically refresh sales data in your spreadsheet so the data is fresh and ready for analysis at the beginning of the day. To learn more about how to record or run macros in Sheets, check out this G Suite Pro Tip. 

Helpful links Help Center: Analyze BigQuery Data within Sheets 

Availability

Rollout Details

• Rapid Release domains: Extended rollout (potentially longer than 15 days for feature visibility) starting on January 15, 2019. 
• Scheduled Release domains: Extended rollout (potentially longer than 15 days for feature visibility) starting on January 29 2019. 

G Suite editions 

• Available to G Suite Business, G Suite Enterprise, G Suite for Education, G Suite Enterprise for Education, and Drive Enterprise. 
• Not available to G Suite Basic and G Suite for Nonprofits. 

On/off by default? 

• This feature will be ON by default.

Stay up to date with G Suite launches

• Get G Suite product update alerts by email
• See the G Suite launch release calendar
• Subscribe to the RSS feed of these updates

Notice the new format for these launch announcements? Give us feedback on it here. 

Going forward, you may notice changes to the format of our launch announcements on the G Suite Updates blog. Based on customer feedback, we want to make our posts more scannable and readable. All the same information you’re used to seeing will be included, but it will be reorganized with new sections to help you quickly see what’s changing and how it might affect you and your users.

We hope that this new formatting saves you time and makes our launch announcements more useful for you. If you have any suggestions or feedback on the new style, please feel free to let us know here.

Thanks,
The G Suite Launch Announcement team

Stay up to date with G Suite launches

• Get G Suite product update alerts by email
• See the G Suite launch release calendar
• Subscribe to the RSS feed of these updates