G Suite Developers Blog

New security management features for domain users with the Admin SDK

November 21, 2013

We launched the Admin SDK in May as a new way for developers to build customized administrative tools for organizations that use Google Apps. A top priority for most administrators is keeping their users safe. Today, we're adding new security management features to the Directory API to help administrators manage:

Access granted by domain users to third-party applications

Application specific passwords created by users

Backup verification codes for users using 2-step verification.

As an example, FlashPanel, a popular tool used by Google Apps administrators, is using these new features to allow domain admins to review installed applications and manage or revoke access to them. The Apps Explorer in FlashPanel allows admins to see which are the most installed apps in his domain or use a filter to review applications by type of permissions (Drive, GMail, etc). It also allows admins to review the number of users who have granted access to a particular application.The screenshot below shows an example of FlashPanel’s customized view of third-party application installs.

In FlashPanel’s integration, admins have the power to whitelist or blacklist apps, as shown below.

The Directory API now also provides the ability to manage admin notifications that are delivered to the Admin Console. Currently, admins receive notifications for events that affect their domains such as users approaching their storage limits or monthly bills that are due. Now you can use the API to list notifications, update their read status, or pull them into custom tools.If you are interested in using these new endpoints, please refer to the Directory API documentation.

Ajay Guwalani

Ajay Guwalani is Product Manager on Google Apps Admin APIs. His current focus is to build next generation admin APIs to make enterprise developers and admins happy.

Your apps + Google Apps = awesome

November 19, 2013

Admin SDKGoogle+ API for DomainsGoogle Appssome significant changesour documentation hereImproved securityConsistent development experienceTest before publishingSimplified publishing experienceDeeper integrationGoogle’s new app launcherEasier discoverabilityPromevo gPanelDraw.ioUberConferenceAODocsSpanning Calendar UndeleteFlashpanelMindMeister

Arun Nagarajan profile

Arun is a Developer Advocate on Google Apps. Arun works closely with the community of partners, customers and developers to help them build compelling applications on top of Google Apps. Arun is originally from the Boston area and enjoys basketball and snowboarding.

Code updates required for Apps Script advanced services

November 8, 2013

table { border: 1px solid #bbb; border-spacing: 0; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0 0 1.5em; width: 100% } th { border: 1px solid #4d90fe; color: #FFF; background-color: #6199df; font-weight: bold; text-align: left; } td { border: 1px solid #bbb; vertical-align: top; } td, th { padding: 6px 10px; } td pre { margin: 0; border: 0; padding: 0; background-color: white; color: black; } .no-border { border: none; } th.first { background-color: #666; border: 1px solid grey; } th code { color: white } span.remove { color: red; font-weight: bold; } span.add { color: #0a0; font-weight: bold; } The APIs for three of Apps Script's advanced services — Analytics, BigQuery, and Prediction — will undergo breaking changes on Monday, November 18. If you don't update your code to the new syntax before then, you'll receive error messages such as Required parameter is missing.Advanced services allow you to easily connect to certain public Google APIs from Apps Script. We're working to expand and improve our advanced services, and as a side effect some methods and parameters that were incorrectly listed as optional are now required.On November 18, these services will switch to use the new method signatures shown in the tables below. To learn how new arguments should be structured, refer to the documentation for the underlying API. For example, the documentation for the BigQuery service's Jobs.query() method shows the valid properties for the resource object in the "Request body" section of the page.

Old

New

Analytics.Management.Uploads

.deleteUploadData(
    accountId, 
    webPropertyId, 
    customDataSourceId, 
    optionalArgs)

.deleteUploadData(
    resource, 
    accountId, 
    webPropertyId, 
    customDataSourceId)

BigQuery.Datasets

.insert(
    resource, 
    optionalArgs)

.insert(
    resource, 
    projectId)

.update(
    resource,
    optionalArgs)

.update(
    resource, 
    projectId,
    datasetId)

BigQuery.Jobs

.insert(
    resource, 
    mediaData,
    optionalArgs)

.insert(
    resource, 
    projectId, 
    mediaData)

.query(
    projectId,
    query)

.query(
    resource,
    projectId)

BigQuery.Tabledata

.insertAll(
    projectId,
    datasetId, 
    tableId,
    optionalArgs)

.insertAll(
    resource,
    projectId, 
    datasetId, 
    tableId)

BigQuery.Tables

.insert(
    resource,
    optionalArgs)

.insert(
    resource, 
    projectId,
    datasetId)

.update(
    resource, 
    optionalArgs)

.update(
    resource, 
    projectId,
    datasetId,
    tableId)

Prediction.Hostedmodels

.predict(
    project, 
    hostedModelName, 
    optionalArgs)

.predict(
    resource,
    project, 
    hostedModelName)

Prediction.Trainedmodels

.insert(
    project, 
    optionalArgs)

.insert(
    resource,
    project)

.predict(
    project, 
    id, 
    optionalArgs)

.predict(
    resource, 
    project, 
    id)

.update(
    project, 
    id, 
    optionalArgs)

.update(
    resource, 
    project, 
    id)

If you want to prepare your code ahead of time, you can add a try/catch around your existing code that retries with the new method signature if the old one fails. For example, the following sample applies this approach to the BigQuery service's Jobs.query() method: var result; try { result = BigQuery.Jobs.query(projectId, query, { timeoutMs: 10000 }); } catch (e) { // Refer to the BigQuery documentation for the structure of the // resource object. var resource = { query: query, timeoutMs: 1000 }; result = BigQuery.Jobs.query(resource, projectId); } We apologize for inconvenience and look forward to sharing exciting news about advanced services in the coming weeks.

Eric Koleda profile

Eric is a Developer Programs Engineer based in NYC on the Google Apps Script team. He's previously worked with the AdWords API and enterprise content management software.

Email address validation with Actions in the Inbox and Mandrill

October 23, 2013

We launched Actions in the Inbox at Google I/O 2013 as a quick way for users to get things done directly from Gmail. Integrating with this technology only requires adding some markup to an email to define what the message is about and what actions the user can perform.We support a variety of action types covering common scenarios such as adding a movie to a queue, product reviews, or other even pre-defined requests. Especially popular with senders is the One-Click Action to validate a user’s email address, as shown below:If you are using Mandrill, the email infrastructure service from MailChimp, writing a Python app to send one of those emails, only takes a few lines of code! Take a look at this example:import mandrill # Replace with your own values API_KEY = 'YOUR_API_KEY' FROM_ADDRESS = 'YOUR_FROM_ADDRESS' TO_ADDRESS = 'YOUR_TO_ADDRESS' SUBJECT = 'Please validate your email address' HTML_CONTENT = """ <html> <body> <script type='application/ld+json'> { "@context": "http://schema.org", "@type": "EmailMessage", "action": { "@type": "ConfirmAction", "name": "Confirm Registration", "handler": { "@type": "HttpActionHandler", "url": "https://mydomain.com/validate?id=abc123" } } } </script> <p>Please click on this link to validate your email address:</p> <p><a href="https://mydomain.com/validate?id=abc123">https://mydomain.com/validate?id=abc123</a></p> </body> </html> """ # Instantiate the Mandrill client with your API Key mandrill_client = mandrill.Mandrill(API_KEY) message = { 'html': HTML_CONTENT, 'subject': SUBJECT, 'from_email': FROM_ADDRESS, 'to': [{'email': TO_ADDRESS}], } result = mandrill_client.messages.send(message=message) To run this app, just replace the API key with the credentials from your Mandrill account and configure the sender and recipient addresses. You should also edit the HTML content to provide your action handler URL, and customize the messaging if you want.You can use Actions in the Inbox to reduce the friction and increase the conversion rate. Please note that you are not limited to validating email addresses: you can also review products and services, reply to event invitations, and much more.For more information, please visit our documentation at https://developers.google.com/gmail/actions. You can also ask questions on Stack Overflow, with the tag google-schemas.

Claudio Cherubino profile | twitter | blog

Claudio is an engineer in the Gmail Developer Relations team. Prior to Google, he worked as software developer, technology evangelist, community manager, consultant, technical translator and has contributed to many open-source projects. His current interests include Google APIs, new technologies and coffee.

Total Eclipse of the Apps Script

October 16, 2013

Apps Script started out as a simple tool to let developers add new features to Google Apps, but it’s grown into a programming platform that thousands of professional coders use every day. We hear a couple common requests from developers when they’re building complex projects with Apps Script: they want a full-featured IDE, and they want to sync to external version-control systems like GitHub.Today, we’re introducing support for Apps Script in the Google Plugin for Eclipse. You can now sync with your existing Apps Script files on Google Drive, edit them in Eclipse — offline, if necessary, and with all the benefits of autocomplete — then write your code back to Drive so you can run it in the cloud. Because the plugin stores a copy of each script in a local workspace, you can manage Apps Script projects with your favorite version-control system.

Getting started is easy:

Install Eclipse, if you don’t already use it. If you already have Eclipse, make sure it’s at least version 3.7 (Indigo) for either Java or Java EE.

In Eclipse, select Help > Eclipse Marketplace, then install the Google Plugin for Eclipse (or see our Getting Started guide for alternate installation instructions).

Click Sign in to Google in the bottom-right corner of Eclipse, then enter your username and password.

Select File > Import to transfer your projects into Eclipse. Whenever you’re online, the plugin will automatically sync your local edits with Google Drive.

For step-by-step instructions on installation and use, see the documentation on using Apps Script with the Google Plugin for Eclipse.Just in case you were wondering, the plugin uses the public Google Drive SDK to sync Apps Script files between your local file system and Google’s servers. We’ve previously covered the techniques it uses in our documentation on importing and exporting projects and the recent episode of Apps Script Crash Course on Google Developers Live below.

Norman Cohen profile

Norman Cohen is a software engineer based in Google’s New York office. He works primarily on the Google Plugin for Eclipse, focusing on improving developer experience in the cloud.

YouTube, Google Forms, and Apps Script: BFFs

October 10, 2013

Last month, we announced several new ways to customize Google Forms. As of this week, three of those options are also available in forms created from Apps Script — embedding YouTube videos, displaying a progress bar, and showing a custom message if a form isn’t accepting responses.

Adding a YouTube video is as simple as any other Google Forms operation in Apps Script — from the Form object, just call addVideoItem(), then setVideoUrl(youtubeUrl). Naturally, you can also control the video’s size, alignment, and so forth.To show a progress bar, call setProgressBar(enabled). Don’t even need a second sentence to explain that one. The custom message for a form that isn’t accepting responses is similarly easy: setCustomClosedFormMessage(message), and you’re done.Want to give it a try yourself? Copy and paste the sample code below into the script editor at script.google.com, then hit Run. When the script finishes, click View > Logs to grab the URL for your new form, or look for it in Google Drive.function showNewFormsFeatures() { var form = FormApp.create('New Features in Google Forms'); var url = form.getPublishedUrl(); form.addVideoItem() .setVideoUrl('http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38H7WpsTD0M'); form.addMultipleChoiceItem() .setTitle('Look, a YouTube video! Is that cool, or what?') .setChoiceValues(['Cool', 'What']); form.addPageBreakItem(); form.addCheckboxItem() .setTitle('Progress bars are silly on one-page forms.') .setChoiceValues(['Ah, that explains why the form has two pages.']); form.setProgressBar(true); form.setCustomClosedFormMessage('Too late — this form is closed. Sorry!'); // form.setAcceptingResponses(false); // Uncomment to see custom message. Logger.log('Open this URL to see the form: %s', url); }

Dan Lazin profile | twitter

Dan is a technical writer on the Developer Relations team for Google Apps Script. Before joining Google, he worked as video-game designer and newspaper reporter. He has bicycled through 17 countries.

Monitor user logins, storage consumption and apps usage with the Admin SDK

September 25, 2013

Security is a top priority for Google, just as it is for many of our Google Apps customers. As a domain administrator, a big part of keeping your users safe is knowing when and how they are using their accounts. Since we launched the Admin SDK Reports API in June, we've continued to add features to let you more easily visualize Google Apps' usage and security in your domain. These new features include:Security Reports

Login audit—View all web browser based logins with IP information for all users in your domain. You can use this data to monitor all successful, failed, and suspicious logins in your domain.

Authorized applications—View a list of third-party applications that users in your domain have shared data with. Gain visibility into how many users are accessing each application. Revoke access to specific apps using the security tab on Admin console.

Usage Reports

Storage quota—View user-level quota usage. This is available both as total usage and split by Gmail, Drive and Google+ photos for every user in the domain. Monitor which users are nearing their quota limits and acquire more storage if necessary.

Google+ usage—View 1-day, 7-day and 30-day active Google+ usage in your domain. See the number of Hangouts attended by users in your domain.

Refer to the Reports API documentation for more details on how to use the Reports API and to see what is possible with all of our entire Admin SDK.

Rishi Dhand profile

Rishi Dhand is a Product Manager on the Google Apps for Business team. In addition to working on data migration features, he also works on the Google Apps administration platform with focus on building new security and admin reporting features. In his free time, he enjoys playing squash and badminton.