When a Google Workspace for Education admin chooses to enable Additional Services for students under the age of 18 to use, they acknowledge that they may be required to collect parental or guardian consent. This includes access to services like YouTube, Google Translate, Google Photos, Google Books, Google Earth and more.

In September 2024, we communicated that we now require admins who have Additional Services enabled for users under the age of 18 to re-review them on an annual basis. Admins are always in control of which services their users have access to, and this gives admins an opportunity to ensure the right users have access to the right services.

• If admins do not want to provide access to Additional Services for their under 18 users, they can turn them off for those users. 
• If admins want to keep Additional services enabled for under 18 users, they need to reconfirm parental consent in the admin console.  
• If admins do not take action, under 18 users who previously had access to Additional Services will lose access in the coming weeks. Admins can re-enable access to Additional Services at any time. 

How admins can take action
Admins were first provided notice of this re-confirmation requirement in September 2024, which indicated a 6 months notice to complete the re-review process before the March 2025 rollout. The banner in the admin console has turned red to alert admins that action is required. While the rollout begins in March, it might take several weeks before some users in your organization are impacted.

You can easily view which applications require consent reconfirmation from Admin console > Apps > Additional Google services. You can re-confirm consent by checking the box next to the app, hovering over the app, or using the three-dot overflow menu. 

A big threat organizations must prepare for is the risk of data exfiltration through unwanted and/or unauthorized means. Whether it’s small-scale, unintended sharing, or a larger breach scenario, organizations need powerful defenses to protect themselves from these risks. To that end, we’re pleased to announce that today Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is generally available in Gmail, alongside Drive and Chat.

DLP is one of the most powerful ways organizations can protect themselves from these risks. With DLP capabilities in Gmail, organizations can identify, monitor, and control the sharing of sensitive data. It works through a series of easy to apply data protection rules that can be implemented to instantly detect sensitive content in outgoing messages, including body content, attachments, headers, and subject lines. 

Admins can now customize the Chrome Web Store experience for their users with several new options, including:

• Branding and custom messaging: Add company logos, custom welcome banners and announcement banners.
• Curated collections: Organize specific extensions for your users, including recommended and private extensions. We have also introduced a new collection of extensions that displays all items that are allowlisted by IT administrators.
• Category controls: Hide specific extension categories to help streamline the browsing experience for users.

Additionally, we've enhanced the Chrome Web Store search experience. In the search results. end-users can quickly notice blocked item tags, and they can benefit from more advanced filtering such as a “Private items” filter.  

• End users: Depending on your admin configuration, the Chrome Web Store may be tailored to your organization’s needs. Visit the Help Center to learn more about installing and managing extensions. 

Rollout pace

• Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains: Available now.

Availability

• Available for all Google Workspace customers with access to the Admin console

Resources

• Google Workspace Admin Help: Customized Chrome Web Store for enterprises
• Chrome Enterprise and Education release notes

In May 2024, we launched the ability for admins to remotely configure managed iOS apps on end-user devices via Google Mobile Device Management. 

Beginning today, admins can use tokens in the app configurations for managed iOS apps. Tokens act as placeholders for information specific to a user or device that uses the app, such as a user's email address or their device serial number. Previously, configuration data was static, but this update gives admins the flexibility to configure devices dynamically according to various users and devices.

Creating the app configuration using XML information using a token placeholder

For Google Workspace customers with Chrome Enterprise Core, we’re pleased to introduce a new Chrome browser profile list and reporting features for signed-in Google Workspace users. These new capabilities give IT administrators more insight into Chrome user profiles in their organization. The report includes a new managed profiles list and detail pages where IT administrators can find information such as profile details, browser versions, policies applied, extensions installed and more. The list of extensions installed allows you to identify versions of extensions that can potentially be a risk factor for your users.

Overall, this update significantly improves how admins analyze how their users are interacting with Chrome and allows them to take action to keep their users and data secure in Chrome.

Getting started

• Admins: Admins can simply log in to the Google Admin console and enable the Managed profile reporting policy. Visit the Help Center to learn more about viewing Chrome browser profile details.

To enable reporting, go to Menu > Devices > Chrome > Settings > User & browser settings > Chrome Browser > Browser Reporting > Managed Browser Reporting

• End users: There is no end user impact or action required.

We’re launching two new settings that will allow admins to control whether their users can add recovery email information and phone information to their Google Workspace account. 

By default, the ability to add a recovery email or phone number is ON for most Workspace users and K-12 super admins, but it should be noted that:

• Adding email and phone recovery information is OFF by default for K-12 users. 
• Phone number recovery collection is always enabled for super admins regardless of whether it’s disabled in the admin console.

Any changes admins make to these settings will overrule the existing organizational unit (OU) settings, except for super admins as stated above.

Beginning today, we’re expanding our data migration experience to include the ability for Google Workspace admins to migrate conversations  from channels in Microsoft Teams to spaces in Google Chat, making it easier for organizations to onboard and deploy Chat. 

This can be done within the Admin console in a few steps:

• First, connect to your Microsoft account.
• Then, upload a CSV of the teams from where you want to migrate the messages. You can specify the source to destination identity mapping by uploading a CSV of the email ID’s from source to target.
• You can only migrate data to accounts of existing users with a user license and the Google Chat service turned on. Visit our Help Center for more details.
• Next, you’ll enter the starting date for messages to be migrated from Teams. Then you can begin your data migration. 
• Finally, you’ll complete the migration by making migrated spaces, messages and related conversation data available to Google Workspace users (see our Help Center article for specific details on supported data types).

When a migration starts, the UI displays a visual report that breaks down tasks with individual progress bars for tasks that are successfully completed, skipped, failed or have warnings.

The final step to complete the migration is to roll out spaces, making migrated spaces and their content available to users.