Google drive as mapped drive?

[Moog1982]

We would like to allow users to be able to access the contents of their Google drive without going through a web browser, instead a mapped drive.

 

Of course, there's the Google Sync Application, but this will result in the local drive being very quickly filled as all of the machines are used for hot desking. Not to mention the huge strain of 1500 users syncing will bring to our network.

 

Has anyone implemented anything to assist with this? Perhaps a 3rd party tool? Google do not seem interested with giving a solution to this problem, I see all over the net that Educational institutes are crying out for a way to make this happen.

[Arthur]

Perhaps a 3rd party tool?

IAMCloud are planning on adding Google Drive support to their Cloud Drive Mapper program, but there isn't an ETA for this feature yet.

 

ExpanDrive supports Google Drive, but it's not suitable for an educational environment.

[Arthur]

I use IAMCloud for Office 365 drive mapping, but it does support Google drive's.

Do you mean doesn't? I asked Gavin at IAMCloud last week about GD and he said it was being added in the future.

[gshaw]

I asked the same question at the end of last week, was told Google Drive support is coming in the next few months.

[Lardboy]

Expandrive looks like a great piece of software. Has anyone got this working on a domain where the kids just have to enter in their Google Username and Password (for Google drive access), or does it not work that way?

 

I have tried an install but I don't have a license, so I don't know how it functions with actual users.

 

Any info would be muchly appreciated

[ExpanDrive]

There isn't a way to avoid the first authentication with Google inside ExpanDrive, but after that ExpanDrive can keep the API key around [in a variety of ways] so if the kids switch machines they don't need to re-authenticate as long as they are logged into the domain.

 

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Curious what wasn't suitable for an educational environment? Would love to fill in any gaps.

[Lardboy]

I get that the pupils will have to enter in the google details but if you enter in the license key at install does this key then work for all kids that log on afterwards (so that they only have to set the drive for their google drive) of does each user have to enter in a key so that they can use it? I see that it's a user license and not a client license.

[ExpanDrive]

ExpanDrive can be deployed so that any user on a machine is licensed automatically if that's what your after.

[FN-GM]

With @ExpanDrive do you need authenticate if you have SAML SSO setup?

 

Thanks

[ExpanDrive]

The user needs to authenticate with Google/Box/etc the first time they connect with ExpanDrive even with SAML SSO. But after that, the SSO will be good enough to log them in going forward, even on other machines.

[Lardboy]

As this is a school and we have a turnover each year, how does the licensing work regards to users as ex amount will leave one year and more will come in. How do you give the license to a new user and take it off the old user? Do you have a licensing control program or something like that?

[ExpanDrive]

Schools generally get some kind of site license to cover N users, and it doesn't really matter regarding turnover year to year. It's an on-your-honor system so there isn't any aggressive tracking or anything like that.

[FN-GM]

The user needs to authenticate with Google/Box/etc the first time they connect with ExpanDrive even with SAML SSO. But after that, the SSO will be good enough to log them in going forward, even on other machines.

 

Thats a shame, for us that is a deal breaker. We setup SAML so we don't have to do that

[Arthur]

Curious what wasn't suitable for an educational environment? Would love to fill in any gaps.

The first-time authentication is a deal breaker for our school too for the same reason as @FN-GM mentioned. If you could solve this I would be happy to give ExpanDrive a try in due course.

 

I actually already use ExpanDrive at home so it was one of the first products I looked at for mapping cloud storage as a drive at school, but there isn't a lot of info on your website (e.g. edu pricing, deployment info, types of licenses etc.) so that's why I started looking at competitors products like ZeeDrive and Cloud Drive Mapper.

Edited June 17, 2016 by Arthur

[ExpanDrive]

If you want to ping our support I'd be happy to see if we can figure out how to get it done.

 

I don't think a user actually needs to authenticate, but the last time we looked into this deeply I think they need to type in their email address and hit next. After that everything is done for them. If you're interested we could see if we can figure out a way to work around this @FN-GM or @Arthur - obviously something we'd like to make seamless.

 

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I don't think a user actually needs to authenticate, but I think they need to identify themselves to the Google OAuth flow at their very first use. Happy to work with you on this to see if we can get around that step.

[Arthur]

@ExpanDrive

 

One other thing I just thought of. Is it possible use Group Policy to configure various settings within ExpanDrive and/or prevent students from mapping non-school accounts as drives?

[ExpanDrive]

Yup, we do customized builds to add/remove functionality like this all the time for various customers.

[FN-GM]

If you want to ping our support I'd be happy to see if we can figure out how to get it done.

 

I don't think a user actually needs to authenticate, but the last time we looked into this deeply I think they need to type in their email address and hit next. After that everything is done for them. If you're interested we could see if we can figure out a way to work around this @FN-GM or @Arthur - obviously something we'd like to make seamless.

 

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I don't think a user actually needs to authenticate, but I think they need to identify themselves to the Google OAuth flow at their very first use. Happy to work with you on this to see if we can get around that step.

 

Maybe the app could automatically pull the users email address form Active Directory like Outlook does when used with Exchange and Office 365? Its only basic LDAP so it can't be hard. If You could make it seamless, I would be very eager to use this in all of our academies in the trust.

 

Thanks

[ExpanDrive]

We can pre-populate the email address with a login hint. Can't be too hard to get the user's email address if it exists on your system in a well-known place. If you're interested in working with us to make this happen please get in touch and we'll get it done. A little hard for us to do it entirely on our own since it's somewhat environment specific.