We’re pleased to announce the public preview of Gmail integration with AppSheet – something we know has been a longstanding community request. With this preview launch, your Gmail inbox can seamlessly connect to the full breadth of downstream processes AppSheet automation already offers.
AppSheet has introduced a Gmail integration in public preview, offering a workaround for situations including third-party applications that lack direct integration with Google Workspace via add-ons or APIs. With this new feature users can now connect their Gmail inboxes to AppSheet, enabling incoming emails to trigger various automations.
How it Works
Users can link their AppSheet apps to authorized Gmail accounts and select specific labels in their Gmail inboxes for monitoring. When an email arrives with a designated label, AppSheet receives information about the email, including the sender, subject, and body. This information can then be used to automate various tasks and processes within the AppSheet platform.
Things to Note
Currently, the beta release does not include support for attachments, but AppSheet is working on adding this feature for the full release later this year. Also, Gmail cannot be used as a full data source in AppSheet. To save Gmail messages in an app table, users need to create a process to add the email data.
Availability and Feedback
The Gmail integration is rolling out to all AppSheet users soon as part of the preview and the AppSheet team is encouraging users to provide feedback on this new integration. To read more and provide feedback follow the source link
Workspace admins with the AppSheet service privilege now have visibility into the activities of their users, apps and licenses via the new AppSheet Admin Console
The Google AppSheet team recently announced the public preview of a new AppSheet Admin Console. The new Console gives Workspaces Admins greater visibility of AppSheet usage within their domain, including AppSheet Core users. The new Console is a big step forward in providing admins a centralized platform to monitor and manage AppSheet usage, licensing, and governance.
Key features include:
Insights into popular apps and top creators
Detailed app ownership and usage data
Comprehensive view of app users across the organization
Easy access to app sharing settings, performance, audit history, and version history
Exportable lists of accounts, users, apps, and licenses
User role management within the organization
Verification of AppSheet licenses (purchased, assigned, and used)
Access to usage monitoring data, even without an enterprise license
The linked announcement page also highlights some planned new features for the new Console include: historical app usage, individual app copy or transfer, self-serve provisioning, external user licensing, and a default organization model for new Workspace customers who purchase AppSheet Enterprise.
A key addition to the new Console is the AppSheet licensing summary. There are some important considerations Admins should start thinking about around AppSheet licenses, in particular, the creation or sharing of AppSheet apps with Enterprise features to unlicenced or Core users.
Previously under the legacy Team licensing model it was possible for an AppSheet Core user to create and share apps with AppSheet Enterprise features. As Google moves to an assigned model Admins will need to reconcile the required licenses for their domain. The good news is Google has said
“In the short team, no users will be blocked. Admins will be given several months advanced notice before stricter license enforcement.”
Google Drive broke the ability to embed images with the /uc path. Here’s how to embed images from Google Drive in your website.
Previously Google Workspace developers could use a /uc path for embedding images and other files hosted in Google Drive. For example, images could be embedded in websites and emails using markup like:
To my knowledge this was never an officially documented endpoint, but widely known about and shared within the community. Back in October 2023 Google announced Upcoming changes to third-party cookie requirements in Google Drive, which has started rolling out from the beginning of 2024.
The impact of this change is it breaks /uc embeds and these have started returning 403 errors. There is no reference to the /uc endpoint in the original announcement, which is why I think many people are only just finding out about the impact now. Google’s official guidance is to move to <iframe> with Google Drive publish and preview links. This post from Justin Poehnelt discusses the options and limitations for images.
If you have strong AppSheet technical skills along with solid Google Workspace skills and would like to share your expertise globally as a recognized “Google Developer Expert” (GDE), we would like to invite you to apply to become an official GDE member specializing in AppSheet and Workspace!
The Google Developer Experts program is a great way to get recognised for your abilities, but more importantly an opportunity to get close to the Google product teams to learn and share your day-to-day experiences. Whilst AppSheet is positioned as a no/low code solution it doesn’t mean there aren’t individuals out their developing sophisticated apps and supporting the community along the way.
If this sounds like you the AppSheet team are looking for community experts to become the next AppSheet GDEs. This source post includes some more information as well as a form where you can note your interested. As a GDE of 9+ years I’m also happy to share my experience of the program and what I think it takes to stand out from the crowd.
Join the experts on October 6th to learn Apps Script tips and tricks to combine APIs, automation, configuration as code, and more to improve your productivity using Google Workspace. Whether you’re a seasoned developer or just getting started with low-code development, this event will provide you with the insights and information you need to start building custom solutions with Google Apps Script.
Recently on Pulse we highlighted the ‘Getting the most out of Google Workspace with Apps Script, tips and tricks’ session as part of Google Cloud Next ’23. This wasn’t one of the livestreamed sessions, but the good news is the session is being rerun online on October 06, 2023 @ 9am PT / 4pm UTC, hosted by Charles Maxson and Kara Ireland from the Google Workspace team.
As well as using the source link to register for the event there is a form link where you can submit your questions in advance. If you can’t make the live session registering will also mean you’ll get notified about the recording. Looking forward to seeing other community members in the YouTube Live chat!
Whether you are a seasoned Workspace developer, just getting started, or somewhere in between, the Google Workspace Developer Summit is a great opportunity to learn more about how you build creative and unique solutions for your business or even the world.
The Google Workspace Developer Relations team are back on the road with in-person summits scheduled for Singapore, Bangalore, Amsterdam and Zürich. These events are a great opportunity find out what is new in the Google Workspace developer ecosystem as well as meeting other people interested integrating and extending Google Workspace products.
Given the nature of Google Workspace, don’t feel you have to be a pro-coder to classify yourself as a ‘Workspace Developer’. Products and features like AppSheet and the Duet AI increasingly blur the lines creating opportunities for a growing audience for Google Workspace centred workflows and solutions.
The full day events are free to attend and you can register to join at the following dates/locations:
We are excited to roll out to GA (General Availability) our first visual editing features to all AppSheet creators, starting today.
This a new way for AppSheet creators to make changes to their apps and navigate the editor. It’s intuitive for anyone to point at what they want to change if they can see it. We are now letting you do that in the editor: you can now hover on visual components of the editor’s app view and see possible editor actions for the outlined component.
Google recently announced the rollout of new new visual editing features in AppSheet. The new feature should help simplify and speed up app development (see the source post for an animated gif / video of what it looks like). In the announcement Google mention that the new feature isn’t available for all components:
Outlines are only available for some components visible in the app. For instance, Detail and Form Views have a lot more controls than the Deck View right now. Additionally, only some Editor actions are available, such as navigating users to Data components, View components, Action components and some of the general Settings.
More updates are planned and if you don’t see this feature in AppSheet yet the rollout has been paused for Google Cloud Next and should be available for everyone soon.
We are excited to announce the General Availability (GA) of our native data store: AppSheet database. Our goal is to blend the simplicity of a table-driven data editing interface with the performance and scale of a relational database for non-technical users.
During testing, AppSheet database was faster than Sheets for processing adds, updates, and deletes of larger tables. In other words, the performance benefits of AppSheet databases are more apparent for a table with 50,000 rows compared to a table with 1,000 rows. AppSheet databases also have better support for concurrent edits.
It’s also worth noting that quick sync is enabled by default for all apps backed by AppSheet databases, even for security filters, so data updates automatically for app users.
Google AppSheet Databases went into public preview in October 2022, the announcement and context being covered in the Pulse post ‘Introducing AppSheet databases: Build data driven apps for Google Workspace‘. The recommendation while AppSheet databases were in preview was not to use them for production as there may have been breaking changes, which limited how much testing I could do, but I still found the occasional prototype project to give them a try. As noted in the general availability announcement the performance is more noticeable on databases with more rows. Where I saw big gains were around ‘quick sync’, particularly when making changes using the AppSheet API.
Something to keep in mind before lifting/shifting your existing Google Sheet based AppSheet apps are the usage limits. For example, Google Workspace customers eligible for the AppSheet Core licence at no additional cost are limited to 2,500 rows per database and 10 databases. The 2,500 rows is also the total amount across all tables in a database, for example, you will hit your quota if 1 database has 5 tables with 500 rows. Moving up to AppSheet Enterprise Standard increases the limit to 200,000 rows with a current maximum of 50,000 rows per table. In the later case Google have said this is a current technical limit and they are looking at increasing this soon. For AppSheet Core users it doesn’t sound like Google will be increasing the quotas anytime soon so it is worth making sure your data source and/or licence aligns with your anticipated data needs. There is an active discussion about usage limits in the source post.
Calling all #GoogleWorkspace Developers! The Google Workspace Platform team will host two Developer Summits at Google Toronto (March 9th) and Google Chicago (March 14th).
The Google Workspace Developer Relations team are on the road again with their latest Developer Summit. This time the team will be hitting Toronto and Chicago. The events are a great opportunity to discuss the Google Workspace platform vision, meet other Google Workspace developers and visit one of the Google offices. Attendance is free and you can find out more about the event and register your interest to attend via the source link.
We’re happy to announce that AppSheet-powered no-code chat apps are now available in preview for Workspace customers in AppSheet!
You can access this feature right now if you are in the Preview Program, and you can provide any feedback in this thread. If needed, additional information can be found in our help center articles. We’re targeting a full launch for later this year.
I’ve been spending a fair bit of time in Google’s ‘no-code’ platform AppSheet. Even for developers there is plenty to get your teeth into with features like Apps Script integration. One of the incredibly powerful core features of AppSheet is the ability to send dynamic emails which include forms designed in AppSheet. These allow users to interact with your app without leaving their inbox.
Whilst the inbox dominates in many business sectors, support for frontline workers increasingly leans on other communication channels including Google Chat. With the announcement of AppSheet powered no-code Google Chat apps there is now an opportunity to also push dynamic forms, send data and interact with Chat users in that space. For developers there is also the opportunity to do even more with the Apps Script integration. Follow the link to the announcement post to find out more…
