Google has launched a new G Suite tool called Work Insights, designed to help surface data about G Suite deployments and collaboration between teams.
Google has today announced a couple of new tools for G Suite users.
First up, the company lifted the lid on a completely new tool called Work Insights, which is designed to help “surface organizational insights about G Suite deployments at the team level,” according to a blog post from G Suite group product manager Reena Nadkarni.
In real terms, this means that employers and admins can dig down into G Suite adoption across the company. It gives an at-a-glance overview of how popular specific apps are within an organization, revealing that Gmail is actively used by 99 percent of employees, for example, while Hangouts may only be used by 62 percent.
So how useful is this data, exactly? Well, the adoption charts show which teams are using which apps most often, and this information could be used to inform training programs. As more companies transition to cloud-based tools such as G Suite, Google is evidently keen to give companies the data they need to justify their expenditure.
It’s not just about adoption rates, however. Work Insights can also be used to reveal collaboration patterns — if an employer can see that marketing and sales are perhaps not working together on documents, this could be a red flag that teams are not as cohesive as they should be.
“This insight can help executives identify opportunities to strengthen collaboration and reduce siloes,” Nadkarni said.
Work Insights is available in beta today.
Back in July, Google also announced a new “investigation tool” that would form part of the G Suite security center. In a nutshell, the tool is designed to help security personnel and admins identify and manage security threats within their company, allowing them to spot suspicious activity on employee devices, for example, and perhaps whether Google Drive access has been shared externally — admins can remove access remotely if they see any dubious activity across G Suite products.
Up until now, the investigation tool has only been available through the G Suite early adopter program (EAP), but from today it is hitting general availability for all users.
“The investigation tool makes it easier for admins to identify threats without having to worry about analyzing logs which can be time-consuming and require complex scripting,” Nadkarni added. “Powerful remediation controls enable admins to take action by scaling incident response across the entire domain with a few clicks.”
