New Google Groups rolling out next month for G Suite customers

Google Groups is an email-based forum aimed at sharing information and other resources within an organization. The new Google Groups with Material Theme redesign is rolling out to enterprise customers next month.

This revamped Groups features a fairly straightforward Google Material Theme that provides a “modern, fresh look” with increased spacing, as well as streamlined controls that are more intuitive and match other G Suite applications. As we described back in March when it entered beta:

Improved navigation starts with consolidated group settings and an updated Members management page, while there’s a new three-step wizard to quickly create groupings. There are new filtering and search options, with ends users also benefiting from a unified My Groups view to see everything they are subscribed to. Meanwhile, like Gmail, “topics” are now called “conversations.”

However, collaborative inboxes, tags, and categories from classic Groups are not yet available, with the revamp also lacking a mobile-optimized interface. The full list of missing features is available here, and you’re able to switch back and forth between versions.

We’re working to add many of these features to new Groups, but organizations and users that rely on these features should continue to use classic Groups for the moment.

Starting today, there is a new setting to enable/disable the new Google Groups in the Admin console. On by default, the actual migration will start next month. End users will otherwise not be able to access the redesign.

• June 9, 2020: Users in Rapid Release domains will start seeing new Groups, unless their admin has turned it off. Individual users will have the option to revert to classic Groups.
• June 23, 2020: Users in Scheduled Release domains will start seeing new Groups, unless their admin has turned it off. Individual users will have the option to revert to classic Groups.