Google continues to try and appeal to the enterprise audience with its Apps for Work services, and not long ago, the company announced its plans to repurpose Hangouts for enterprise users. More recently Google announced its partnership with Box in order to give Apps for Work a stronger cloud infrastructure in the enterprise market, and now the search engine giant has announced that Google+ has become a core Google Apps for Work service targeted at business users.
As of yesterday, Google+ has become a part of the company’s Apps for Work service, meaning that the social networking platform will be subjected to “the same technical support and service level commitments as any other core services”, including Google Drive and Gmail. Thus, going forward, domains using Google+ will be able to take advantage of a number of benefits, including “domain-restricted content and activity […] handled as specified in your Google Apps agreement”, and the fact that Google+ will be “added as a monitored service to the Apps Service Dashboard (ASD)”. The company also specifies that Google+ will be removed from the “Additional Google Services” list in the coming days, and instead it will be added to the list of Google Apps services in the Admin console. It’s also interesting to note that, in order to deliver “a service that is consistent with the protections of our Google Apps agreement”, the company has made a couple of other changes which will affect your domain’s current use of Google+. According to the company “All web users on a computer will be automatically upgraded to the latest version of Google+”, and these users will not have the option of reverting to the “classic” user interface. Additionally, “native mobile app versions of Google+ released prior to today’s launch will no longer be fully supported”, which means that mobile users will have to make sure that they are always running the latest, upgraded version of the Google+ mobile app.
Lastly, Google notes that they will update several default settings for new domains in order to make content less visible to the public; however, no settings will be changed for existing domains, and Google recommends users to review these settings on their own and set them according to their needs. More details can be found on Google’s official blogspot (source link below) which also contains a handful of useful links to Google’s Help Center for users who may want to change their settings or review additional tutorials.