GSuite - and Google for Education

[Zoom7000]

It's just good old drag 'n drop :-)

 

This is exactly what we did. I simply had a meeting with the staff telling them our servers were out of warranty, we had too much junk on our systems and we were moving to Google Drive. They just dragged and dropped. Over the year, I've run several other sessions (or 1 to 1 discussions) on transitioning away from Office/ActivInspire over to Docs/Sheets/Slides etc. Yes, there has been some backlash, but ultimately it's about leadership buy in and accepting positive progression.

 

As for the argument on excessive bandwidth use, not sure what the worry is really? I haven't noticed anything in terms of excessive usage to cause concern. Our pipe in and out is an LGfL 200Mbps connection and it's 1Gbps to the desktop or 802.11ac to the mobile devices.

 

As mentioned above, the cost of storage for me was far greater. Not just in monetary value, but also in support and risk management costs. There are arguments that the data is far more secure in the cloud, especially with 2 step authentication. You could in theory do away with backups completely. Google's admin console has built in restore capabilities (if you want an extra layer, you could look at backupify etc). The point here is that there are growing savings that are not just monetary.

 

There will always be an argument for on-premise vs cloud, but the main argument should be that there shouldn't be an aversion to change and looking at different ways of working.

[fiza]

@Zoom7000 can I ask about the savings you have made ? What did you get rid of to save money?

[mavhc]

The excess bandwidth usage would be for high bandwidth things like photo and video editing, 3d modelling etc, if you're not doing that, not an issue.

[cwade1001]

It's just good old drag 'n drop :-)

 

So I create a service account, and guessing give it access to the domain for the Google Drive API, how do I then just drag and drop users personal home folders from Windows Server to their personal Google Drive....??? I have googled and researched and just not getting it. With OneDrive on O365, you can upload using powershell and a tenant admin account, or give the admin users access to the users drive.

[TwistedHelixis]

recently I just installed backup & sync on the data server and selected all the main folders (not home drives) and synced them across. Then I told everyone that if they needed anything from their own home drives they would need to copy it to Google Drive using File Stream, which they had been using for a few weeks already. Only had to help a couple of teachers to copy and paste.

[The_IT_Guy]

recently I just installed backup & sync on the data server and selected all the main folders (not home drives) and synced them across. Then I told everyone that if they needed anything from their own home drives they would need to copy it to Google Drive using File Stream, which they had been using for a few weeks already. Only had to help a couple of teachers to copy and paste.

Out of interest how much data are we talking about here and how long did it take? Did you convert to Google docs or leave then as office? Cheers

[TwistedHelixis]

Out of interest how much data are we talking about here and how long did it take?

 

I think it took about a week to do it all (not sure of the size sorry, but I did it in blocks, for example I started with the planning folders syncing and when that finished, I moved that over to a team drive and then started the next area. It might have been faster to just do the entire staff drive in one go but it was the first time I used backup and sync to do this so wanted to take it slower. The handy thing is that after it has backed up a folder you can still take your time before telling the staff that it is now in Google as its kept hidden in the Computers section of Google, but constantly synced with the data on the server, ready for the day you move it to Team drives and tell all the staff to stop using the server.

 

Did you convert to Google docs or leave then as office?

Much to my frustration the school wanted to keep using Word / excel etc so nothing is converted. This is where File Stream helps as the staff just keep working on word and a mapped drive, as though nothing has really changed.

[mavhc]

You have to stop people wanting to print at the same time as you switch to GApps for it to work great. So you need a portfolio system that works well.