Have any Schools moved their file storage to G Suite entirely?

[mukz]

Whilst we don’t use google, we worked department by department when migrating them to OneDrive and teams. That way we could show them the benefits properly.

[DrCheese]

Whilst we don’t use google, we worked department by department when migrating them to OneDrive and teams. That way we could show them the benefits properly.

 

How did you lay this out? A team for each department? - If so.. how do you get around it when staff need access to other departments files (i.e if doing a cover lesson)

[mukz]

Great question! To be honest i dont know as Usually our staff have to provide the cover on paper for the person covering, kinda defeats the purpose but i am pretty sure this is what they do

[Ditto]

I'm tempted to present this thread to senior leaders at my secondary school. They are part of a large MAT and very shortly the MAT is taking over all of IT support. The MAT team would appear to be deeply wedded to the legacy cable network, client/server and MS world regardless of cost. There is one teacher, a GSuite Trainer, managing all pupils and a few teachers to use GSuite, with Google classroom being a big winner. Our MAT is a mix of Primary and Secondary and it will have it's own domain. Is anyone managing a GSuite environment in a multi-school environment, with potentially the need to share documents across the schools. What sorts of challenges did you hit and how did you overcome them?

[TwistedHelixis]

On a much small scales but I look after a federation of primary schools and they all share G Suite docs, calendar, etc. Originally they were all separate G Suite domains but I moved them all in to one system, making them all sub domains. The teachers all share docs across the federation and it all seems to be working fine for them.

[SpaceInvader83]

On a much small scales but I look after a federation of primary schools and they all share G Suite docs, calendar, etc. Originally they were all separate G Suite domains but I moved them all in to one system, making them all sub domains. The teachers all share docs across the federation and it all seems to be working fine for them.

 

How was the process for moving them all over to a single G Suite and sub domains? Relatively painless?

[TwistedHelixis]

Turned out a lot easier than I was expecting, considering our DNS etc is all controlled by our LA, so had to request some changes with them before I could continue.

[richmackie]

I'm moving one of my primary schools to G Suite right now. Not entirely as staff still need Windows PCs to use SIMS, but the ICT suite is being replaced with Chromebooks and I'm currently moving one of the shared folders to a Google shared drive. Has anybody found an efficient way to upload pupil documents to their individual Google drives?

[Ditto]

Thumbs up! Probably not for now, but maybe replacing SIMS is the next step and drop the need for Windows PCs

[Ditto]

I'm moving one of my primary schools to G Suite right now. Not entirely as staff still need Windows PCs to use SIMS, but the ICT suite is being replaced with Chromebooks and I'm currently moving one of the shared folders to a Google shared drive. Has anybody found an efficient way to upload pupil documents to their individual Google drives?

I believe there are a few threads discussing options with regards migrating data, but you might find the following a useful place to start.

[flyinghaggis]

We use spanning backup but will be taking a look at cubebackup.

 

Spanning backup backs up all emails, docs, team drives, calendars, sites to another cloud based host, it is a full feature reliable backup system, you can even export a google doc as a word doc if needed, but it is not cheap.

 

Cubebackup is more of a manual backup, you can backup to onsite system or cloud and is very cheap

 

Thanks for the suggestion. May have to investigate that as it sounds significantly cheaper than Spanning.

 

We obviously need to add in our storage costs on top of the licensing though so it won't be as good as it appeared just looking at the per use price unfortunately!

 

I took the decision NOT to install Drive File Stream. Firstly, when we migrated, it wasn't yet available. Secondly, I'm still not convinced that if a PC was to get infected with ransomware, would it not encrypt every Google Drive file?(!) Thirdly, I wanted to prepare our users for a native ChromeOS working environment, as opposed to reliance on the past way of doing things (using Windows Shares and using Microsoft Word instead of Google Docs).

 

 

That's pretty much my thoughts regarding File Stream. I can appreciate it would be useful but I'd like to make a clean break from the dependency on local storage if I can and push users to a cloud only solution. Similarly I'm rather nervous about the implications and risks of giving staff access to File Stream from their own personal devices in particular. I'd rather the school's cloud data remain in the cloud and not be downloaded or sync'd to/from local devices.

Edited July 31, 2019 by flyinghaggis

[Bev]

We have for all intents and purposes. We do have a server, but the staff barely use it, everything they use day to day is stored in the google drive.

 

It works very well, but we have been doing this for quite a few years now and it has taken a while to get everyone used to it.

We use google docs for all documents as well, so they are doing everything within the google system, rather than just using it for storage.

[jmak]

Thanks for the suggestion. May have to investigate that as it sounds significantly cheaper than Spanning.

 

We obviously need to add in our storage costs on top of the licensing though so it won't be as good as it appeared just looking at the per use price unfortunately!

 

 

 

 

That's pretty much my thoughts regarding File Stream. I can appreciate it would be useful but I'd like to make a clean break from the dependency on local storage if I can and push users to a cloud only solution. Similarly I'm rather nervous about the implications and risks of giving staff access to File Stream from their own personal devices in particular. I'd rather the school's cloud data remain in the cloud and not be downloaded or sync'd to/from local devices.

You can restrict Google Drive from Desktop (the new name for Filestream) to organisation owned devices (endpoints).

 

https://support.google.com/a/answer/9299541?hl=en

[Zoom7000]

You can restrict Google Drive from Desktop (the new name for Filestream) to organisation owned devices (endpoints).

 

https://support.google.com/a/answer/9299541?hl=en

 

I've known about this for quite some time, but I've still chosen to avoid File Stream altogether to avoid any risks with potential ransomware infections.

 

I think it helps users to understand the transition to Google Drive, to learn how to use it via the web browser, as opposed to rely on the old File Explorer method for on premise file management.

 

It's worked quite well at my schools and we've now been fully using Google Drive for storage since 2017.

[Sonic007]

Nearly everything is GSuite here and we actively tell people to store ther files on Google Drive so if their machine goes down it won't all be lost.

 

One thing I do reccomend though is setting up Shared Drives in advanvce, eg. for year groups and classes as if you have teachers sharing many files from their own drives and then they leave and the account is deleted and the files have not been transferred ownership then you can be in a mess.

[IGB]

Over the last few weeks I've uploaded a secondary school's teaching resources to shared drives using RCLONE.

I had already setup the drives a couple of years ago and did a sync back then, however no body would bite the bullet and turn off the local storage. This particular school had requested that we uploaded the data and changed the local storage to read only for staff, which I fully expect will be turned off completely by Christmas of this year.

 

They also requested that the same folder structure was created in a Shared Drive for their Admin documents as well and I used RCLONE to do that as well.

[TwistedHelixis]

You can restrict Google Drive from Desktop (the new name for Filestream) to organisation owned devices (endpoints).https://support.google.com/a/answer/9299541?hl=en

 

if only there was a simple way to highlight all the devices listed in the devices section and make them company owned devices :-(

[RLR]

if only there was a simple way to highlight all the devices listed in the devices section and make them company owned devices :-(

 

You should be able to get a list of your devices from AD and upload that to the admin console or use GAM to create the devices. This is my plan once I get round to it.

[xicor]

we moved everything to SharePoint, way better than google

[TwistedHelixis]

we moved everything to SharePoint, way better than google

 

Personally I think Workspace is a better fit for schools but that's just my opinion having actually used both.

[TwistedHelixis]

You should be able to get a list of your devices from AD and upload that to the admin console

Think I'll add a feature request at Google to make it possible to move devices to business owned devices section.

[xicor]

what is that ? do you mean the amazon workspace ?

 

Personally I think Workspace is a better fit for schools but that's just my opinion having actually used both.

[bald_pig]

what is that ? do you mean the amazon workspace ?

 

Google Workspace...

[Ditto]

Personally I think Workspace is a better fit for schools but that's just my opinion having actually used both.

 

Used both too and I agree. Biggest win was teachers were on-board very quickly with Workspace. I believe a well setup Sharepoint can be very good, but in my experience it's rarely well set up. I'[m just pleased we have a choice and neither are awful.