Cloud services for charity

[jmak]

I'm setting up cloud services for our out of school club which is a registered charity which is associated, but financially entirely separate from the school.

 

I personally prefer GSuite to O365, so I've started with that. However, it's missing a few functions that I'm used to having, specifically Team Drives and Vault. It's also limited to 30GB per user. I can get around the lack of Team Drives, but I'm worried that they're legally required to have email archives

 

Is there a way around that, or should I bite the bullet and set up O365 with all the pain that is SharePoint? They would still have to pay for email archiving, but it's a separate service at 57p/user/month whereas with Google, they'd need the paid service at £6.60/user/month.

 

Thanks

[Ditto]

It took some digging, but it appears the GSuite for non-profit's is the same as GSuite Basic, so yes, to have strong admin control you'd need to pay for the GSuite business, which I see has recently increased in cost in the US - not sure about the plan for UK. However, I wonder if you can work with the school to have a separate domain under their parent domain and have full delegated permission to manage your part? How close is the relationship with the school for this club? I wonder if any schools out there let PTA' (or Friends' of the school as appears to be vogue nowadays!) run under their GSuite for Education license. In fact, if your club is educational, perhaps that'll qualify you too?

 

*** Update *** appears a separate GSuite for Education setup is not an option as you'd need to be accredited. See https://support.google.com/a/answer/134628 - although that seems to exclude non LEA schools and independents so I guess it's not fully accurate!

Edited January 23, 2019 by Ditto

[jmak]

The club was originally quite small and although it was nominally a separate organisation, it was essentially run by school employees. It was therefore running on school systems.

 

Over the years, it has grown and part of the point of setting this up is so that they are completely separate and have no reliance on school systems.

 

Current price for GSuite for business for non-profits is £6.60/user/month.

 

You can also buy Vault as an add on. It's £5/month/user. I presume I would only need to buy for the admin user? Would I need to archive anything apart from files and emails of people who've left? I'm assuming that any files owned by current users will remain available?

[Ditto]

If you want Vault, I think it would only make sense for all at +£5 each users, but you'd need to inform everyone about what it stores from a GDPR point of view. I can't see it would make sense for only the admin (your account?) to have vault enabled - in fact I think it would potentially be a conflict of interest. I do wonder if you really need vault? It can track at a very low level, potentially every 5 secs whilst drafting an email. There's even a setting as to whether the draft versions are tracked. Do you really need that level of tracking? In terms of documents, the files version histories are maintained in the Edu version and I presume the same for , but not sure on the Basic version. Besides, you could probably archive by scripted methods. This could drift in to retention policies and that's another headache if you don't have a legitimate reason to hold the data. Have a look at https://support.google.com/a/answer/7061566?hl=en - it might help you decide if that's sufficient. Ultimately vault can be set 'for ever' but I think you'd have a hard time justifying that. Exactly what it stores I can 't recall but this will help https://support.google.com/a/answer/2462365?hl=en

[jmak]

Thanks for taking the time to reply. They actually have a data retention policy which makes sense, so I need to make sure what I implement I'm meets it. For files, I'm happy that we can do it quite easily. I will create a user called archive and anything which they are required to retain can be moved there with suitable sharing permissions. The area I was hoping Vault would deal with is email archive - especially for employees who leave and therefore have their accounts deleted. Having read more about, two things don't work with this approach; firstly you need a Vault license for each account you want to archive and secondly it doesn't work for deleted accounts.

 

For now I'll take Google's advice and instead of deleting accounts, I'll suspend them. Then all I need to worry about is how they get rid of data they don't need to keep.

[Ditto]

Just one thing to note is that whilst suspended, you needed to keep paying the licensing fee. For GSuite for Education that's not an issue as it's free anyway, but the business version, you might want to archive (there are some export options) and then delete otherwise you keep paying. Hope it all works out.

[jmak]

GSuite for non-profit includes unlimited accounts at no cost(one of the few differences from basic). I will look at exporting options though.