Google announced today that Google Apps admins can now support the needs of different user groups in their business or organization with new email settings.

“Google Apps delivers a stream of innovation that brings new features to end users,” writes product manager Adam Dawes on the Google Enterprise blog. “That same innovation also applies to our Apps administrators. In the past 3 months, admins have gained a number of new capabilities in the control panel, including the ability to search email logs, manage mobile devices more easily, and manage email delivery.”

Now, email settings can be applied to organizational units (OUs). These could include IMAP & POP access to Gmail, offline access, email forwarding, email footers, etc.

“Applying email management settings to user groups helps Apps administrators tailor the use of Gmail within their organization,” says Dawes. “It’s especially beneficial for organizations that have user segments with different compliance or security needs, such as allowing IMAP access to a specific group of users.”

Admins will need to refresh their browsers to get access to the updates.

In other Google Apps news, Google will release new features for comments in Google Sites on October 8th. These are similar to features available for comments in Google documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Users will be able to +mention others, get new comment notifications via email and respond to comments via email.