Google software users will see the benefit of generative AI improvements in Workspace productivity apps.

Google said that generative AI would be able to do the following in Workspace:

– Draft, reply, summarise, and prioritize your Gmail
– Brainstorm, proofread, write, and rewrite in Docs
– Create auto-generate images, audio, and video in Slides
– Go from raw data to insights and analysis via auto-completion, formula generation, and contextual categorization in Sheets
– Generate new backgrounds and capture notes in Meet enable workflows for getting things done in Chat

The first set of features will aim to help users write documents or emails in Google Docs and Gmail.

With the “Help me write” feature, users can generate a draft document or email that can reproduce a variety of styles – including job postings or birthday invitations.

The “Rewrite” feature allows you to generate a polished document from structured data – for example, a bulleted list of important topics discussed in a meeting – using the “Formalize” option.

Selecting “Elaborate” will allow the generating AI to expand the information, “Shorten” will shorten it, and “Bulletise” will list the most important elements of the text.

Google stresses that it will allow users to retain control over the content by allowing them to accept or edit the changes that the AI has made to the original text.

The company will initially make these features available to testers in the US before rolling them out to the public.

Dependencies have some integration cost, of course, but really good libraries or services—Stripe is a great example, or PostgreSQL—let us add them with almost no effort. They’ve successfully unbundled their area of concern from user code.

This goes for frameworks, too, and some languages. When they work, when they really get problems out of the way, it feels magical.

Over the last 15 years, many companies have begun to productize that experience.

Why is authorization so hard?

Authentication is the mechanism for checking who you are—like a log-in screen. It’s the front door to your app.

Providers like Okta/Auth0 and Amazon Cognito have APIs for authentication. Authorization is the mechanism for checking what you’re allowed to do—like what pages you can see, what buttons you can click, and what data you can touch.

It’s common to hack together a quick and dirty solution for authorization to start. Usually, that looks like some if statements and roles in a database. That can last a little while until you need to add more authorization features, like role hierarchies, nested objects, and relationships. Any entities that don’t map to a simple list of roles add complexity, and it’s hard to write that code without a plan.

Or, you might want to let customers define custom permissions. Or you might want to go multi-tenant or move to microservices. There might be any number of requirements you didn’t anticipate when, understandably (and often correctly), you started with some basic if statements. When that time comes, your team will inevitably do a big refactor (think six to 18 months) on a domain that’s not central to your business

To get a sense of why this is hard, imagine an application like Google Docs. You have docs that you own. You can view, edit, comment on, and delete these docs. You have docs and even folders that someone has shared with you. Maybe you can edit or just comment on these. There might be other docs for which you only have view access.

The system is controlling access across files and folders, orgs, teams—up and down, at varying levels, and preventing you from seeing docs that you shouldn’t. There are two key aspects of authorization:

The logic is specific to the application itself. How you’d build authorization for Google Docs is different from how you’d build authorization for something like Salesforce or Expensify.

The authorization controls the use of the application’s everyday data, so you’re going to need full access to that data. This means that the authorization system needs access to your application’s data, which will be in a different form for every app.

Every company goes through a custom design process to write custom code to solve its authorization problems. Thousands of companies, solving thousands of authorization problems, every day.

How to make authorization easier

So, if you were going to build an API or a library for authorization, it would need to address the two requirements noted above, along with making life easier for developers. It would need to:

• Be customizable to the application.
• Have direct access to the application data.
• Be generic enough that it actually saves time and effort, vs. developers writing the code themselves.

It was first announced last October and since then the company has released a number of innovations to it for businesses, nonprofits, and classrooms.

Users can use Google Workspace to create a secure collaboration space to share ideas and keep track of information. It provides suggestions for recommended files and people to share with. To access these integrated, collaborative experience users need to turn on Google Chat. They can then use Rooms in Google Chat as a place for connecting, creating, and collaborating. Google plans on evolving Rooms over the coming months into Spaces. It will introduce a new user interface, in-line topic threading, presence indicators, custom statuses, expressive reactions, and a collapsible view.

The company also announced Google Workspace Individual, which is designed for small business owners. It provides premium capabilities such as smart booking services, professional video meetings, personalized email marketing, and more. Google Workspace Individual will soon be available in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Australia, and Japan. Kelly Waldher, vice president of marketing for Google Workspace, and Aparna Pappu, vice president of engineering at Google Workspace, wrote in a post:

“Every day, the world’s most innovative companies, schools and nonprofits use Google Workspace to transform how people work and achieve more together. It’s a daily part of how leading healthcare providers revolutionize patient care, schools turn remote learning into an immersive, personalized experience, and aerospace companies rethink flight. Now, with Google Workspace for everyone, you can organize your junior sports league with ease, take that fundraiser to the next level, or even turn your hobby into a business. Whatever it is, Google Workspace helps people (teams, families, friends, volunteers, neighbors…) connect, create and collaborate.”

In addition, Google announced new security and privacy features protecting Workspace. It has launched Google Workspace Client-side encryption, which gives customers direct control over their encryption keys and identity service. According to Google, client-side encryption is especially helpful for organizations storing sensitive data, such as intellectual property, healthcare records, or financial data.

There are also new trust rules for Drive, which gives customers more control over how files can be shared within and outside of their organization. They will be able to set specific rules for organizational units and groups, which allows for a more granular approach than applying blanket policies to all users. New Drive labels will allow users to classify their files to ensure they’re handled correctly. Drive labels also integrate with Google workspace’s data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities. Files can also be classified automatically based on DLP rules defined by the administrator.

In addition, the company is introducing new phishing and malware protection. When abusive content is found, the file will be flagged and will only be visible to admins and the file’s owner, preventing sharing and reducing the number of users exposed to the abusive content.