Google launched Apps Vault for Apps for Business customers about two years ago. It’s aimed at helping businesses reduce costs of litigation, regulatory investigation, and compliance.

It’s not a product that gets a lot of headline-grabbing updates, but Google has been making some necessary changes to the offering.

For one, the company just announced that Google Apps Vault-using businesses can now assign privileges based on organization units. In other words, you can limit specific admins to search and export only specific organization units.

This is an effort to address privacy and security concerns, so not all admins have access to all Vault users in a domain.

“Google Apps Vault helps businesses, schools, and governments of all sizes archive, retain and manage business business-critical information,” says product manager Deborah Hsieh. “Vault also helps with continuity, compliance, and regulatory purposes. Last January, the introduction of targeted legal holds gave our customers even more control over the emails they retain by restricting holds to searchable criteria.”

“Last month, we launched OU-based search, which lets Vault administrators search for data within a specific OU,” she says. “Vault’s OU-based search and OU-restricted search reduce the number of irrelevant search results that a domain-wide search can produce, and eliminates the need to specify individual accounts. For example, if your OUs are structured by geography, you can restrict your administrator based in London to only search your users in Europe.”

More on Apps Vault here.

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