Google has announced via a blog post that Google Workspace customers in the Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, and Education Plus tiers will now be able to create dynamic groups. These groups can be made by querying custom user attributes such as the user’s country, department, language, and more.
The query information will be pulled directly from the organization’s directory and can be used to enforce security policies. In addition, Google Groups administrators can create groups that manage membership automatically to keep the group members up to date. For example, you could create a group of everyone in your organization that has not enrolled in 2-step verification with a query such as user.is_enrolled_in_2sv==true, which will add and remove members accordingly without any manual changes. All membership queries available for dynamic groups are referenced in the Help Center.
Dynamic groups differ from other Google Groups in several ways, so it is up to the admin to determine the best way to handle group creation based on the below:
- You can’t manually add users to the group without changing the membership query
- There are no elevated member roles, such as owners or managers. Only Google Workspace admins can manage the queries that make up the groups.
- You can’t add a group within a group, only users.
The feature is available now without any end-user impact. I can see this being extremely helpful for large corporations with users in different locations and working different hours. Dynamic Groups will make it very easy for admins to create an email group for a distribution list that goes to just U.S. employees or employees that work remotely. There are so many possibilities here that Group Admins can experiment with.
