News

You can now show automated real-time captions when you present in Google Slides. This feature uses your computer's microphone to detect your spoken presentation, and then transcribes what you say as captions on the slides you're presenting. This helps improve accessibility and in environments where it's hard to hear. This feature can help make your presentation more effective for:

The Hangouts Chat Desktop app is now available for Windows and Mac. Learn more about how to use Hangouts Chat, or Download Hangouts Chat and get started right away!

The new Gmail experience was launched earlier this year with an opt-in option. Soon after October 16th, 2018, new Gmail will become the default experience, and anyone who previously opted out will be automatically migrated to the new experience. Users will no longer be able to toggle back and forth between the classic and new versions of Gmail. 

Additional resources: 

Rescheduling in Google Calendar just got easier. Starting August 13, 2018, Google is introducing a new feature that enables more efficient meeting scheduling. Now, each guest invited to a meeting can propose a new time and the organizer can easily review and accept time proposals. This allows for richer communication between attendees, reduces time spent on meeting practicalities, and makes meetings more productive with key stakeholders in attendance.

Google will be retiring "legacy" comments made on "binary" files such as Microsoft Office or PDFs that are stored in Google Drive, starting on July 31, 2018. The bConnected team will be contacting 82 individuals who are impacted by this change. 

This is related to the New Ways to Comment on Microsoft Files (and more) announcement made on February 7, 2018.

Whether you’re on vacation or just offline at the end of your workday, Google Calendar can help protect your time out of the office. Google is introducing a new out of office option and customizable working hours to further improve your digital well-being.

Indicate when you’re going out of office

When creating an event on the web, simply select the “Out of office” Calendar entry type. The Out of office object will have a different look on the Calendar grid, signalling to others that you’re unavailable.

To help Google Forms users create more personalized surveys, feedback forms, quizzes, and more, Google is introducing new theme customization options. Specifically, you can now choose colors and fonts to theme your form. 

Update 6/15 8:00am: This work was successfully completed, without an outage.

Maintenance on the Earl Warren Hall Data Center firewalls between midnight and 3 AM on Friday, June 15th may affect your ability to log in via CalNet to services including the bConnected Google and Box services, and the bCourses Projects sites.

If you are already logged into Google or Box or bCourses, your access should not be affected.

See the IST Service Status page for more details.

We can guarantee you’ll want to work on the go, but we can’t guarantee you’ll have Wi-Fi. Fortunately, native offline capabilities in the new Gmail make it possible to work without interruption—even when you don’t have an internet connection. Starting now, if you're using the new Gmail in a Chrome browser (v61 or higher) can search, write, delete, and archive up to 90 days of messages, even when you're offline.

If you're using the new Gmail, it will now “nudge” you to reply to emails that may have missed and to follow up on emails which haven't been responded to. 

Nudging is on by default with the new Gmail enabled, but you can turn it off from your Gmail settings menu if you choose to. 

As previously announced, the old Drive desktop sync client for Mac and PC—a feature officially known as “Google Drive for Mac/PC”—will start to shut down on May 12th, 2018. After May 12th, the sync client may not work for bConnected Google accounts. 

Google has released a new version of Gmail that includes highly anticipated features like snoozing, smart reply, and the ability to use Google Calendar, Keep, Tasks, and Add-ons while in Gmail.  

The new Google Sites provides a simple and elegant way to create websites. To help your site stand out, you can now customize your favicon—the icon which appears in a browser tab or bookmark list—to match your site. This can help your viewers more easily recognize your site, and help you reinforce your branding.

G Suite is built for working collaboratively—teams create and share files all the time. When there can be hundreds or thousands of files, though, it can be tricky to find those files later. So we’re improving how you find files that have been shared with you in Google Drive.

The “Shared with Me” section shows the files that have been shared with you. We’re going to start intelligently organizing this section so you may also see people listed, along with files they’ve shared with you. Simply click on a document to quickly open it.

Starting today, you can publish Google Sites to a specific audience. This new feature is great for teams or departments that want to keep their site restricted internally, or to a defined group of people. 

To publish your site to a specific audience, select the “Share with others” icon and change the Published settings to “Specific people can view when published.” Next, add the individuals you want in the “Invite people” box and select “Can view published.”

bConnected users may be unable to access their bCal, bMail, and other services requiring CalNet authentication. Information Services & Technology (IST) staff are investigating the issue and will publish updates on the System Status page.

Last fall Google launched a new user interface for Google Calendar on the web. Google will require all Calendar users to upgrade to the new interface by February 28, 2018, when they will retire the classic version.

Google has announced that Inbox by Gmail is going away at the end of March 2019. Inbox users will be switched to the new Gmail interface, which includes top Inbox features like snooze, nudges, and more to help you get more done. For help transitioning to new Gmail, please review Google's support article: Move from Inbox to Gmail. 

Starting today, you can switch to Google's new sleek calendar interface in bCal. 

Try the new calendar:

There is a Google Docs outage that is impacting a significant subset of users, including bConnected accounts. Google is working to resolve the issue and will post  updates on the G Suite Status Dashboard.