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Showing posts from November, 2021

Add Some Virtual Fun This Holiday Season with Zoom Apps

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  We know that video meetings have become a big part of how you stay connected across your professional and personal communities — from team syncs to family gatherings and everything in between. Zoom Apps right inside your Zoom experience can make virtual or in-person gatherings with family and friends or colleagues easy, engaging, and fun!  We’ve gathered a handful of Zoom Apps to help you get the virtual party started. Happy Zooming! Mentimeter Festive Quizzes Bring some friendly competition to your virtual get-togethers this year with Mentimeter’s fun seasonal quizzes. With many ready-to-use quiz templates, use the Mentimeter for Zoom app to gather loved ones together wherever they may be and test their trivia knowledge on some favorite holiday traditions. Get started with Winter, Hanukkah, Christmas, or Kwanzaa quizzes! LGN Poker Night Deal your family in this holiday season with Live Game Night Poker and Zoom! LGN offers live audio, video, and chat through Zoom so you can...

Join us for Google Cloud Security Talks: Zero Trust edition

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Join us for our final  Google Cloud Security Talks  of 2021, a live online event on December 15th, where we’ll focus on all things zero trust. During this multi-session digital event, learn how you can leverage a zero trust approach to protect your employees, users, and critical information, with sessions including the following:  A keynote from Sunil Potti and Rob Sadowski to   kick off Security Talks   on December 15th. They will provide an update across the product portfolio and highlight how you can build a more secure future with Google Cloud. Following this will be a panel discussion on our   vision of zero trust   with perspectives from across Google our product, security, and Office of the CISO teams, featuring Tim Knudsen, Heather Adkins, and Jeanette Manfra. These leaders will discuss different frameworks to protect against common security threats, as well as provide some insights into the work Google is doing to build a unified zero trust sy...

Assign SSO profile to organizational units or groups with the SAML Partial SSO feature, now generally available

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  What’s changing Earlier this year, we announced a  beta  for assigning SSO profiles to organizational units or groups. This feature is now generally available and allows admins to specify groups or organizational units (OUs) to authenticate a subset of your users using Google. Who’s impacted Admins Why it’s important Currently, when you configure SSO with a third-party identity provider, the setting applies to your entire domain. However, there are some instances where you may want a subset of your users, such as vendors or contractors, to authenticate with Google instead. The Partial SSO feature gives you the flexibility to specify the authentication method for various users in your organization as needed. Getting started Admins:  In the Admin console, navigate to  Security > Settings > Set up single sign-on (SSO) with a third party IdP > Manage SSO Profile assignments.  Visit the Help Center to learn more about  assigning SSO profiles to o...

How to Make Your Presentations More Engaging Through Visual Communication

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  Over 50% of the cortex, the surface of the brain, is dedicated to processing visual information, occupying more space than anything else we do. In fact, according to bestselling author Dan Roam, using visuals to tell stories is one of the most powerful ways to get a message across. With drawings and images, you can clarify what’s in your own mind and confirm if someone sees it the same way, fostering mutual understanding and better connections.  In the latest entry in our Building Forward webinar series, Roam shared his key insights on using simple yet dynamic visuals to clarify ideas, plans, and messages. The art of an engaging presentation When we see the sun shining outside, it helps us decide what to wear. We see traffic ahead on the road, so we decide to take another route. We make decisions based on visuals every day, so it stands to reason they can also help inform the way we work, learn, and present information. When we build presentations, we have to keep in mind ou...

Host Google Meet meetings with up to 500 participants

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  For selected Google Workspace editions, users can now host meetings in Google Meet with up to 500 participants. See below for more information on availability. We hope that by increasing the meeting size, it will be easier to connect and collaborate with your colleagues, clients, and customers.  Getting started Admins : No action required. End users : No action required. The new participant limits will occur automatically for all meetings in your domain. If you need to host an even larger meeting, you can enable live streaming, allowing up to 100,000 viewers to watch at once. Rapid and Scheduled Release domains: Full rollout (1–3 days for feature visibility) starting on November 16, 2021 Available to Google Workspace Business Plus, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, and Education Plus customers Google Workspace Updates

Use new immersive backgrounds and styles for Google Meet on the web

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  Google is adding five new immersive backgrounds for Google Meet on the web. The backgrounds feature subtle animation that give your background life or change your lighting. Cafe and condo interiors will have various iterations, such as snowy or rainy weather, which will help dispersed teams better represent their current time zone and climate.  Additionally, we’re giving you more options to customize your video with various light and color filters and more stylized backgrounds. The new backgrounds and styles are available on Google Meet on the web and can be added before joining a call or during a call using the recently launched effects settings panel.   Admins : To enable or disable immersive backgrounds and styles, go to Admin console > Apps > Google Workspace > Settings for Google Meet > Meet video setting. End users : When enabled by your admin, visit the Help Center to learn more about using video effects and background change in Google Meet. Rapi...

Foundations of a scalable website on GCP

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Starting a website can be hard, we get it. There are many vendors you have to work with and steps to tie together. What DNS records do I need to add? How do I enable DNSSEC? Is my website secure and safe from cyber attacks? These types of questions plague millions of website operators globally. We are excited to share that it is possible to manage all of these steps in one location using Google Cloud. Google Cloud offers you the ability to manage the entire lifecycle of a website from start to finish. You no longer have to worry about managing different subscriptions and understanding the integration between vendors. Leveraging the Google Cloud offering will allow for you to have a scalable, reliable, and safe deployment. Additionally, there are extra benefits that you can take advantage of, like getting Google Managed SSL certificates for free and taking advantage of best in class DDoS protection with our Cloud Armor solution. Architecture diagram The following architecture diagram il...

How spam detection taught us better tech support

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  Information Technology teams, especially in help desk and support, need a way to track what problems people are having. Ideally they also can know how those problems change over time, especially when technology or policy shifts. Imagine you are in charge of sending a newspaper delivery team to different neighborhoods. Each person has a bicycle, so you give them a route, and they leave the papers at the right doors. But the roads change. Every day they change. It's chaos. What do you do when routes are changing constantly?  How do you provide the information needed when the context is shifting all the time? In an IT context we run into similar challenges with traditional problem management frameworks such as  ITIL 4 , which tend to always assume a fixed, well-defined catalog of services. That way every issue that the IT folks solve is tracked and accounted for. That connection back to the catalog allows insight into what's causing issues, or where outages or incidents ma...

Copy a single page or subset of pages in new Google Sites

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  Quick launch summary In new Google Sites, we’re adding the ability for editors to copy a single page or subset of pages into a new site. Previously, it was only possible to make a copy of an entire site. This feature gives site editors more control, allowing users to reuse part of a site or easily break up a large site into smaller sites.  We hope this feature, in addition to other recent site editing capabilities such as  restoring a specific page from a site , make it easier for site editors to collaborate on large sites. Getting started Admins:  There is no admin control for this feature. End users:  From the three-dot overflow menu, select  Make a copy > Pages > Selected Pages  — select the pages you want to copy and then select "OK". You’ll receive an email notification with the link to your new site. Visit the Help Center to learn more about  copying a site ,  using Google Sites ,  finding what’s changed in a Site ,  d...