Moving to google apps

[Sheridan]

I suppose when I break it down, there's probably 30-50 staff who have critical stuff in their inbox, the rest maybe not so much. Most of the students (apart from sixth form) wouldn't even notice if we didn't port their mailboxes over as I imagine their inbox is just full of 'lol' 'lmao' type of messages anyway!

[blundellm]

We are totally Google, and have minimal problems and zero downtime. Your eggs are probably in safe hands as Google provides tools to extract your data from their clutches if you deem it necessary. see here: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190?hl=en

[jallsop]

My concerns aren't really relevant - once SMT has seen a) shiny new VLE and b) cost saving of free email then its almost impossible to counter that. Well, here anyway!

 

Having said that, I can see the advantages of all this, but I have reservations about cutting exchange out of our organisation.

@jallsop - what DP concerns did you have to make you want to withdraw? I thought the whole google education thing was neatly tied up for UK data laws? Personally I'd rather we provided our own cloud systems but that costs money and google doesn't.

 

I'm based in Switzerland, and the group of schools I belong to did some digging. If you register a .uk or other EU address, then your primary data store will be in the EU zone, however, the reflected backup, we've learned, may fall outside the EU DPA compliant countries. For Swiss education users, it is normal to follow the same rules as the .uk users. But the AUS rules don't meet the EU DPA either, we've learned.

In the end it is the managing groups decision, not mine. Part of the reason comes down to the kind of students, or more rightly, parents we have. The information about them must remain as tightly controlled as possible. Non EU DPA countries are not trusted by the group, so we have to look for other solutions. We've got about 24 months we think.

Hope 365 gets better soon. Still not impressed with the realtime collaboration and versioning in MS products, and will so miss the forms and other little extras that Google has developed, or added from 3rd parties.

[CAM]

This is similar to what I saw at BETT from Realsmart realsmart: your learning portfolio but it was expensive.

 

Hmm just had a demo with these guys. It was interesting...but I can't help thinking would we be better off looking at Google Apps on our own? That said, we are looking primarily at a VLE replacement for Fronter and I don't know how a VLE would look on a vanilla Google Apps install.

 

We already have Mail but given our LA support team is rumoured to be going private, we are having to look at alternatives.

[caffrey]

Oh the other thing I forgot, Mail merges I can't get the admin staff to escape from exchange and outlook... (very annoying) How is everyone else mail merging with gapps ? I've introduced them to mail chimp but they can't grasp it.

[Sheridan]

One thing that does concern me about moving to google apps (and therefore google drive) is the effectively unlimited and unmonitored storage students will have access to. Worse case scenario a student can stick a pornographic/extreme gore etc ripped film in their drive, and play it when in school and perhaps upset other students.

 

With the traditional server storage you can monitor/block/control what sort of files and the quota, google drive offers nothing like this as far as I can see?

[robjduk]

Fair point but we have Securus at my place which watches out for things like that. Should there ever be a real problem you would have to change their password to get access to their files but at the rate it is changing, I can see admin level access coming soon enough. Should a student be silly enough to do something like that, as it is all web based it would leave a paper trail a mile long anyway.

[Sheridan]

Yes, but adding Securus is an additional cost. I think SMT (and teaching staff to some degree) can have an almost evangelical approach to google and google apps, but there can be disadvantages that aren't immediately obvious.

 

Don't get me wrong, its the way forward but I'm going in with my eyes wide open!

[CAM]

What monitoring and auditing tools does Google offer?

[blundellm]

What monitoring and auditing tools does Google offer?

 

If you have the GAPPS console, then you can see what users are doing with their files: https://support.google.com/a/answer/2773649?hl=en

 

The system is more watertight if Chromebooks are used because Chromebooks do not allow installation of media player software, so pupils can't play downloaded vids etc.

[Sheridan]

Just another question for those who have moved to Google Apps (or even other cloud VLEs) - How have you found the impact on your local storage usage?

 

Or in other words, have you noticed a massive drop in the use of Home folders (or shared folders) on the network, no real change or even an increase?

 

I'm guessing that with a 30gb storage on google the traditional home folder will be used much less than presently.

[robjduk]

Not found a huge difference as yet as we are running it side by side for the moment and word is still spreading to the potential of it. My school has photography and media eat all the storage and don't think google will change that for the moment.