Tag Archives: Google Apps

Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Google Messages Users On Android Get New Features

Do you use Google Messages?  If so, there’s good news!  In recent months, the company has taken steps to bridge the Windows and iOS ecosystems the Android ecosystems and the iOS ecosystems.

They’ve been creating a more seamless user experience and allowing users from those various ecosystems to communicate and share more easily.

The latest update to Google’s Messages app for Android includes a whole raft of new features. Of special significance, users will now have access to iOS reactions.  If you’re not familiar with these, they are a small handful of Emojis that capture the essence of the most common reactions people tend to have toward messages they receive.

In addition to that, Google’s latest update also adds support for sharing links to Google Photos into Messages and allowing the sending of full-quality photos and videos to non-RCS users on iOS.  In a similar vein, if you send a Youtube video link from an Android device to an iPhone the recipient will now get a preview of the video.

The latest version of Messages also includes several “quality of life” enhancements. These include the ability to automatically delete one-time password messages after 24 hours and the option to sort your inbox into personal and business-oriented massages to help you stay organized.

If you haven’t updated to the latest version of Google Messages and are excited to give these new additions a try, just head to the Google Play Store and download the latest for free.  It’s a very good update that gives you some fun new capabilities you’ll enjoy playing with.

It’s also worth mentioning that Windows users can access their Android messages on their PC from a browser tab. So the company really has come quite a distance in terms of tying the ecosystems together.  Kudos to Google for their continuing efforts!

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Suspicious Files Get New Warnings In Google Drive

If you have Google Drive, there’s good news.  The company has recently announced that soon they’ll be rolling out a new feature to help alert users to the presence of suspicious documents.

Google Drive users will soon start seeing banners alerting them to possible dangers This will serve as an additional layer of defense that will hopefully keep people from clicking on links embedded in malicious files, which may guide victims to poisoned sites.

The company first announced the new feature back in October during the Google Cloud Next 2021 user conference.

The company explained the functioning of the new feature as follows:

“If a user opens a potentially suspicious or dangerous file in Google Drive, we will display a warning banner to help protect them and their organization from malware, phishing, and ransomware. 

Google will automatically evaluate any files that are shared with you from outside of your organization for phishing or malware. If detected, Google will block your access to the file in order to protect you.”

As to the message, Google kept it simple. 

If you open a suspect file, you’ll see a bold yellow banner across the top of your screen with a message reading:

“This file looks suspicious. It might be used to steal your personal information.”

This is the latest in a series of moves the company plans to make to help protect its user base and prevent Google Drive abuse.  Last year the company added phishing and malware protections in their Enterprise environments that automatically tagged all suspicious files and only left them visible to their owners and Admins.

It’s a small change but it could have significant impacts.  That means fewer users getting taken in by malicious documents and that’s a very good thing.  Kudos to Google for continuing to add user protections.

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Live Captioned Language Translation Comes To Google Meet

Google is once again raising the bar where messaging and team meeting software is concerned.  The company just rolled out the first phase of its new live translation service for Meet users after months of beta testing the feature.

Naturally this is the first step in a long process, so there are some limitations and caveats to be aware of.

Right now, the translation service only works if you speak English and it can only translate your speech live into four different languages at present. These include French, German, Portuguese and Spanish.

Currently Google and Microsoft are in a bit of a Translation War with Microsoft recently upping their translation game and allowing for real time live captioning of content from English to 27 different languages.  The limitation here being that they are not translated from one language to another.

Google may be a bit behind the curve but their goal is to catch up quickly. If history is any guide at all that’s entirely within the realm of possibility.  We’ve seen Google move at a blistering pace when the company gets excited about something and they seem determined to catch up with and ultimately surpass Microsoft on the translations front.

All of this is superb news for anyone who has business dealings in various parts of the world where language differences can be a significant barrier to getting anything meaningful done. As Google puts it they see their efforts as equalizing information sharing, learning and collaboration.

It does all those things and more. We are thrilled to see two of the biggest tech firms on the planet pouring so much time and effort into this project.   Though world peace is too lofty a goal to consider, if we can at least understand each other, we’ll all be a whole lot better off.  Kudos to both Microsoft and Google.

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Google Working On One Tap Solution To Password Issue

Internet users are notoriously bad at selecting secure passwords for the sites they frequently use that require a login.

Surveys reveal that more than a third of internet users are in the habit of using the same password across multiple sites. The danger is that if a hacker breaches one of your accounts then many of your others may be at risk.

A number of big tech companies have tried various approaches to solve the problem over the years. Google is the latest to do so.

The company recently introduced Google Identity Services. The new service allows users to sign in with a single tap using a secure token tied to one of their Google accounts. This is functionally similar to the ubiquitous “Sign in with Facebook” prompts you see on a wide range of websites. However it has the advantage of being more secure. It is more secure because the Facebook prompt simply recycles your password while Google Identity Services employs a secure token.

Developers have an easy time adding the new functionality to existing sites. The “One Tap” sign in routine can be made to simply scroll down from the top of an existing page or come in from the side. It vanishes once the user taps to sign in.

The hope is that this new functionality will help keep users from choosing the convenience of recycling a password so they have less to keep track. That is rather than the greater security that comes with maintaining a unique password on every site a user visits.

It’s too early to tell how successful the approach will be. On the surface it does seem like a good solution to a very real problem. Kudos to Google for taking steps to make us all safer. Even when that means keeping us safe from ourselves and our own bad habits.

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Google Drive Users Should Be Aware Of Upcoming Update

Does your business utilize Google Workspace? If so, be advised that the company recently issued an alert for Workspace admins. The alert warns that a planned update designed to improve security relating to Google Drive link sharing could actually cause some of the links to break, which in turn, could overwhelm your company’s IT support line with incoming calls about broken links.

The company had this to say about the planned update:

“The update will add a resource key to sharing links. Once the update has been applied to a file, users who haven’t viewed the file before will have to use a URL containing the resource key to gain access, and those who have viewed the file before or have direct access will not need the resource key to access the file.”

If you’re a smaller company and you don’t have thousands of files on your Google Drive, any problems arising from the update may be manageable. On the other hand, the more heavily you rely on Google Drive for mass file storage and link sharing for collaboration, the bigger a problem it’s apt to be.

Given this, Google is allowing admins to opt out of the update, or to only selectively apply it, but there’s a catch. If you don’t do anything, it will be applied to your organization. You have until September 13th, 2021 to assess the coming change and its impact to your organization and determine how the update should be applied to your users if you don’t want the default, wholesale application, and communicate that information to Google.

Note that post update, the owners of files that are impacted by the change will receive an email notification, flagging the impacted files. Admins who have opted to allow it can give those users the option to remove the security update from the impacted files, thus sidestepping the issue.

If it sounds messy and complicated, it is, or at least it can be. If you use Google Workspace, you’ll definitely want to stay on top of this coming change.

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