ANUJ GOYAL: Hi.
I'm Anuj Goyal, and I'm going to give you
a sneak peek of what's to come in Chrome
Browser for the enterprise.
I'm a product manager on the Chrome Browser Enterprise team,
and here's our agenda for today.
We have a few topics of discussion.
First, I'll go through the list of features since last Next.
Second, I'll talk about the features that
are coming in 2020 and beyond.
So let's get started.
So what's happened with Chrome Browser since Next 2019?
Well, we've launched Chrome Browser Cloud Management
in April 2019, and it has seen a lot of great adoption
since then.
It accomplishes three goals.
First, it is a single destination
for applying Chrome Browser policies across Windows, Mac,
and Linux from one pane of glass.
Second, admins can gain easy insight into their deployment,
including getting a list of extensions
installed in their fleet.
And third, for admins that have large organizations,
it offers an easy way to delegate management
to specific organizational units.
We've also added a memory limit policy, an M79,
which is super useful for admins that manage
a lot of virtual machines.
This policy allows admins to limit the amount of memory
that Chrome can use before tabs start being discarded.
If you have large VMware or Citrix environments,
we highly recommend trying out this policy.
For feature controls, we've heard a lot of feedback
from various customers.
Admins will now have more granular controls
over update behavior.
In addition to the version controls that already exists
today, Chrome now has a policy to configure Chrome variations.
At a high level, features are rolled out between updates
and within a release itself.
And ChromeVariations is the policy through which
you can control this.
You will be able to pick between three options--
variations enabled, which is the default
and allows all variations in Chrome;
critical fixes only, which will disable all experiments
and progressive rollouts; and last, variations disabled.
No changes will be deployed using the variations framework.
Choosing this setting significantly increases
the risk of security and compatibility issues
and is not recommended.
For especially large organizations,
the critical fixes only is a reasonable middle ground.
And for further details, please attend my colleague
Kellen's session.
Many of our admins that are MacOS machines
have asked for a PKG file.
This is a special installer format
that is compatible and can be deployed easily
through UEM tools such as AirWatch and Champ.
It can be downloaded today from chrome.com/enterprise.
Many of our customers are also starting
to manage their deployments through Admin Console,
and we are bringing additional capabilities
into that pane of glass.
In the past year, we have added password alerts, legacy browser
support, and cookie controls to Admin Console.
In addition, we consistently work
towards improving the performance and the UX of Admin
Console every release.
You should continue to see improvements year over year.
The policy page has been updated so
that it's easier to read and search through the group policy
list.
It offers the ability to filter by OS and by Chrome version.
Finally, we also offer hyperlinks to directly take you
from the policy page into the Admin Console.
Tab Groups is now available in M83.
Users can easily organize tabs by groups,
and each group can have a color and a name
to help keep track of different tasks and workflows.
We highly recommend trying out this feature.
To meet customer requirements around GDPR,
we have provided an API for taking data out
of Admin Console.
You will be able to securely gather all of your browser
information, including policy and extension information,
in case you want to do your own analysis or reporting.
We've included a link to the support
article for more details.
Now, update controls is a feature that has recently
launched in Admin Console.
The main features are pinning Chrome to a specific version
and enabling the ability to do a rollback of Chrome browser.
In addition, admins can toggle the component updates,
configure relaunch policies, configure
when we check for updates, toggle cacheable URLs,
and also toggle automatic updates.
We got a lot of great feedback from our trusted testers,
and it is now ready for admins to use.
Here is a demo of how we can do a rollback from Admin Console.
As you can see, we're on Chrome 81.
Then we go into Admin Console, set the target version to 80,
and enable rollback.
Then, back on Chrome browser, we restart the browser.
And you can see, from the version number,
that we're back to Chrome 80.
Now let's look at what's coming in 2020 and beyond.
We continue to work on features that
fit into our three pillars--
centralized management, protecting Enterprise users,
and enabling the business through your workforce.
First, let's talk about centralized management.
We are building a version report to clearly show you
major and minor versions of Chrome that are
deployed in your enterprise.
If you click on the chevron, the row
will expand to show the minor versions.
This page is great for your security and compliance teams
and gives them insight into the number of machines
running specific versions of Chrome.
Here's a screen capture showing the report as well as
the major and minor versions.
We did a lot of analysis about why Enterprise users
call IT support.
Guess what?
Most of the requests to IT are to clear a cache in cookies.
So now in the Admin Console, an admin
can simply find the profile that a user is complaining about
and remotely clear their cache and cookies,
saving both the administrator and the end-user time.
The Trusted Tester for this feature
should start sometime in Q3 2020.
Managed bookmarks is a feature that gives admins
much more fine grain control over bookmarks in the Admin
Console.
This is important for enterprises that want
to set company-wide bookmarks.
We know a lot of you have hundreds or even
thousands of bookmarks, and we're
working on giving you the controls needed
to manage these bookmarks.
In addition to the API for exporting browser information,
we are also, in the future, going
to build an API to configure the 300 plus browser policies.
This will make it easy for enterprises
to write scripts to set different policy
values across your domain and organizational units.
Let's move on to another theme for 2020, which
is protecting Enterprise users.
Chrome is carrying through of our goal
of making the web a more secure place for users.
We're also working with the Enterprise ecosystem
to give them stopgap measures while they work on their change
management for these features.
And we're working with other browser vendors
to improve user protection.
First, for Flash, Chrome is adding additional warning text
in the activation prompt in M83 to inform users
about the timeline for deprecation.
We've also published a blog post that
goes into much more detail about Flash deprecation.
Second, TLS-- Chrome will block TLS 1.0 and 1.0 sites
by default in Chrome M84.
The SSLVersionMin policy can be used
to re-enable TLS 1.0 and 1.1 until January 2021.
And third, same site.
Starting July 2020, Chrome 80 will
require cookies to explicitly-- excuse
me-- will require cookies to explicitly allow third party
access.
If admins want to enable legacy behavior,
we've created two Enterprise policies
that will be available until July 2021.
And our final theme for 2020 is enabling the business
through your workforce.
Customers have asked for an easier way for end-users
to request extensions.
Admins want to get an aggregated set of requests
and then make a decision to approve or deny the extension.
As you can see, the end-user will be
able to click on Add to Chrome.
And then a dialog will pop up.
And clicking Send will send a request over to the admin.
Then, in the Admin console, an admin
can easily see the extension names
with the number of employee requests.
After clicking on the extension, the side panel appears.
And the admin can either force install or block the extension.
Another productivity feature is going to be sending tabs
to other windows.
This is available in Canary today,
and we look forward to your feedback.
We know a lot of admins are working through the Win 7
to Win 10 transition.
And we've heard from customers that they
need more time to transition.
As a result, we will continue to fully support Chrome
on Windows 7 until July 2021.
You just saw some of the 2020 highlights.
And we'll also be prioritizing increased reporting, better
security, and further ecosystem integrations.
To make sure you stay up-to-date with these announcements,
please look at these useful links--
release notes, our ever popular policy list, the Chrome
Enterprise download page, help center articles and our support
offerings, as well as the browser specialists team.