Google Gmail - Allowing teachers to send to Year Group distribution lists

[Rob446]

Hi everyone, hope we're all back into the swing of things for the new term.

 

Here's a problem that's not reared its head before:

 

We have groups set up in Google Admin for each Year Group - every student is part of their year's group.

 

I want to allow all teachers (and some other staff, but let's not needlessly complicate things at this stage) to be able to send email to these groups, but we don't want all students to be able to. In fact, we don't even want students who are members of that group to be able to send to everyone. Year 11 group chats can get pretty unsavoury very fast.

 

Teachers are a sub OU of Staff, Students are their own OU, broken down into year groups.

 

As far as I can see, I can either allow "Entire Organisation" to email these groups, "All Group Members" or only the Group Managers. I don't want to have to add all staff to every Year Group distribution as they get enough email they don't read as it is.

 

Is there any way of doing this?

[jthompson]

You can do this with a content compliance rule in the Gmail admin settings.

 

Allow 'Everyone in the organisation' to post messages to the group, but in the Gmail admin pages, create a content compliance rule at the root OU to block any messages sent to that group's address. Then at your Staff OU, find that same content compliance rule and turn on the override so as to disable the rule for the Staff OU. That will mean that staff can send to the group but nobody else will be able to. If all your student groups can be matched with a single rule in some way (for instance, they are all "students.something@", you can deal with them all in one content compliance rule.

 

You can use a similar arrangement to allow staff to send to staff groups that they're not themselves a member of, whilst preventing any students from sending to them.

Edited September 27, 2021 by jthompson