CloudM Automate Release Notes

24 September 2026: Automate V3.5.0.0 and Backup V1.16

This release takes Drive Management out of early access and makes it generally available, adds activity history and bulk actions for shared drives, and brings a modernised interface to Backup.

Drive Management

Now generally available, across four tiers

• Signatures — no access to Drive Management.
• Essential, per user — full control of any user's My Drive, plus read-only visibility of shared drives across your domain, showing risk: external members, public link sharing, and every ownerless or unmanaged drive.
• Pro, per drive — everything in Essential, plus acting on the shared drives themselves: reassign an orphaned drive, remove or downgrade an external member, fix sharing, empty trash, or delete. One drive at a time, or the list on screen up to 50 drives.
• Enterprise, per estate — everything in Pro, plus bulk fixes across your whole filtered estate at once with no page limits, and recommendation cards that act on every drive matching their condition.

✨ New & improved

• Activity history — a searchable timeline of what is happening in Google Drive: who did what, to which file, and when. Edits, sharing changes, moves, deletions and membership changes are all recorded.
• Activity in the place you are looking — the same view appears in four places, each scoped to what is on screen: across the whole organisation from Drive Management, within a single shared drive, for an individual user, and for one file from its action menu.
• Filter, then share what you found — filter by date and time, event type, person and drive. A filtered view keeps its filters in the page address, so you can bookmark it or send it to a colleague.
• Jump straight to the detail — select a value in the table to go to the related user, drive or folder. Select a file name to open its details.
• Bulk actions on shared drives — prepare one action across a set of drives: up to 50 you pick, all of them, or every drive matching up to five conditions. Available to view on Essential and Pro; running a prepared job requires Enterprise.
• Review before you run — the job is prepared in the background and the matching drives are saved, so you review the exact list before running it. Run it or discard it. Prepared jobs expire after five days.
• A result for every drive — each drive reports completed, skipped or failed, and failed work can be retried.
• Easier to read long lists — the shared drives list now scrolls inside a fixed frame, so the column headers stay visible and the horizontal scrollbar is always within reach.

Backup

✨ New & improved

• A modernised interface — the backup status, restoration, policies, purge and storage configuration screens have been rebuilt to match the rest of Automate.
• Restoration in one place — item and full restoration are now a single journey, covering users, shared drives, organisational units, smart teams, all users and deleted users.
• Better tables throughout — sorting, filtering and pagination on the status and restoration tables, with a refresh control. Filter backups by status, email, policy or organisational unit; filter shared drive backups by status, drive or policy.
• Clearer policy management — the policies list shows type, description, coverage and whether a policy is active, with edit, view assignments and delete available from the row.
• Retention defaults from your storage configuration — a new policy inherits the retention set in Storage Configuration. Changing it on the policy marks that policy's retention as Custom.
• Purge with a confirmation step — purge user or shared drive data with a confirmation flow, filtering, and bulk selection.
• Storage configuration — a new screen for connecting a storage bucket, by email or storage account key, with a guided empty state when none is set up.

Directory

✨ New & improved

• Import organisational units from a CSV — a new upload tab on the organisational unit import.

Automate platform

🛠 Fixes

A round of fixes across the platform:

• Offboarding and workflows — the Transfer ownership of documents step now populates the New document owner field, offboarding triggered by a move no longer forces a suspend step into the workflow, and the delete user after days and delay fields now accept the values you type.
• Delegated calendar access — delegation no longer fails where a user has no existing delegates, the delegate window reflects changes as soon as it opens, and the invalid None option has gone.
• Search, filters and lists — the Country filter in Logs now works, an incomplete organisational unit path no longer breaks search results or dynamic list population, and large result sets show 1000+.
• Elsewhere — the dashboard settles more predictably on opening, a request sync no longer reports Successful before it has finished, and filter buttons, dropdowns, modal close buttons and page headings are now consistent across Users, Organisational Units and Shared Drives.

Where to read more

These knowledge base articles have been updated for this release.

Drive Management

• Drive Management: getting started
• Drive Management guide

Backup

• Backup status
• Backup restoration
• Backup restoration status
• Backup policies
• Backup policies: creating and editing
• Backup purge
• Backup storage configuration
• Troubleshooting Backup Policy Errors

Elsewhere in Automate

• Navigating CloudM Automate
• CloudM Labs

All release notes for the CloudM Automate platform and its core functions: Workflows, Archive, Backup, Drive Management, and Signatures.

Find out what's new in the latest releases of CloudM Automate below.

11 August 2026: multi-function release, including Drive Management

This release introduces Drive Management in early access through CloudM Labs, and brings updates to the core Automate platform, Backup and Archive.

Drive Management

Early access, via CloudM Labs

Drive Management is a new area in Automate giving administrators a single place to see and manage every shared drive across their domain, browse the folders and files inside them, and view an individual user's My Drive without signing in as the user.

⚠️ This is an early access release in CloudM Labs, not a general release. If you submit a request via CloudM Labs, CloudM will approve and the Drive Management option will be available. 

If you are already approved for CloudM Labs, then the option will be available immediately.

✨ New & improved

• Every shared drive in one list — with search, filters, configurable columns, sorting and pagination across your whole domain.
• Unmanaged shared drives are flagged — drives left behind with no manager are surfaced automatically, with a one-click filter to review them.
• Manage a drive without leaving Automate — update its settings, move it between organisational units, manage members and roles, rename it, delete it, or create a new one. You can also select several drives and apply an action across all of them.
• Browse folders and files inside a drive — and review or change sharing at the file level.
• Export a drive's data — the current columns and their contents.
• View a user's My Drive — from their record in Directory, including their storage use and transferring ownership of individual files.

Find out more: Drive Management

Automate

Version 3.4.0.0

This release completes the move of Organisational Units onto the modern Automate interface, and improves offboarding exports and notifications.

✨ New & improved

• Organisational Units rebuilt — the OU list, creation flow and detail view have been rebuilt in the modern Automate interface, with actions available directly from the OU.
• Inherited values are now visible — inherited settings are clearly marked, so you can tell at a glance what an OU sets itself and what it takes from its parent. Nothing about your configuration has changed, only how it is displayed.

🛠️ Bug fixes

• Send-as names — you can now type a space in a send-as name, and the left and right arrow keys no longer change which send-as address is set as the default.
• Inspect configuration — “Deprovisioning” no longer appears under Directory > User Actions for users where deprovisioning is not configured.
• Organisational unit photos — resolved an issue where OU photos failed to load.
• Editing an organisational unit — improvements to the edit OU experience.

Backup

Version 1.15

This release is focused on getting your data back faster, and on giving you control over how much of it a first backup captures.

✨ New & improved

• Restore more than one thing at a time — restores now run at the same time instead of queueing behind each other. We have also lifted the restriction that blocked a restore to a user while another restore to that same user was already in progress. In practice a large recovery no longer has to be run one job at a time, and a mistake in one restore no longer blocks the next.
• Limit how far back an initial backup goes — you can now set a history limit on initial backups for Drive, My Drive and Shared Drives, so a first-time backup captures a defined period rather than everything ever created. Note that the limit applies to the first backup only; ongoing backups continue to capture everything that changes.
• Modernised authentication — backup authentication has been brought up to date so that CloudM's activity is verifiably attributable in your Google Cloud audit logs, rather than appearing only as your own service account from an anonymous address. This defaults to your current configuration, so no action is needed and your existing backups carry on as normal.

🛠️ Bug fixes

• Large domains — backups no longer fail when a job has been waiting in the queue for a long time before it runs.

Archive

Version 2.15

This release makes archive restorations significantly faster where more than one service is involved.

✨ New & improved

• Faster restorations — an archive restore now brings back Mail, Drive and Chat at the same time rather than one service after another, so a restore covering more than one service finishes considerably sooner.