google chrome for education

[One_Minute_Hero]

has anyone tried this? any joy? any issues?

[sonofsanta]

Quite a few have tried it, and it's eminently doable. Just spend the time sorting your GPOs out.

 

Fun things to watch out for: favourites don't roam unless you redirect them, and you need to use Chrome-specific environmental variables to do it. App store needs banning, sign-in-to-your-account needs blocking. Cloud Print should probably be blocked. You'll have fun getting the home page sorted and, as far as I'm aware, will never get it to display on a new tab by default.

 

There's a few other threads round and about with more specifics.

[toothy]

Quite a few have tried it, and it's eminently doable. Just spend the time sorting your GPOs out.

 

Fun things to watch out for: favourites don't roam unless you redirect them, and you need to use Chrome-specific environmental variables to do it. App store needs banning, sign-in-to-your-account needs blocking. Cloud Print should probably be blocked. You'll have fun getting the home page sorted and, as far as I'm aware, will never get it to display on a new tab by default.

 

There's a few other threads round and about with more specifics.

 

Would you recommend, stay with Internet explorer? or any other browsers that are up-to date and easier to manage than chrome for education?

[Pyroman]

We have it, but only because staff have installed it so it's not GPO'd (yes i know i need to stop making them local admins!)

[sonofsanta]

Would you recommend, stay with Internet explorer? or any other browsers that are up-to date and easier to manage than chrome for education?

 

Firefox doesn't, as far as I'm aware, have a particularly useable set of ADMs natively. Chrome is the only viable alternative, and doesn't seem too bad to manage once it's set up (it updates itself whether you want it to or not, apparently).

 

Personally I'm intending on keeping IE as default and just having Chrome as an option - so much educational software is geared towards IE specifically. Plus change scares my users.

[Danp]

IE9 here by default, a few users have a shortcut to FirefoxPortable that is sat on a hidden shared drive.

[deanrawlings]

We've just started using it, as you say the GPO's are a bit time consuming to get right, almost there with it now just need to block "sign in and sync" "sign-in-to-your-account" how did you get around this? Our Smoothwall blocks the gmail webmail side of things but the "sign in and sync" is still allowed. Also had a quick go at blocking "chrome://" and "chrome://signin" but no joy, and there doesn't seem to be any settings in GPO for anything "sync".

[Arthur]

the "sign in and sync" is still allowed.

You need to set the SyncDisabled policy in the registry to disable this option. i.e.

 

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Google\Chrome]
"[color="#FF0000"]SyncDisabled[/color]"=dword:00000001
"AllowOutdatedPlugins"=dword:00000001
"AlternateErrorPagesEnabled"=dword:00000001
"AutoFillEnabled"=dword:00000000
"BackgroundModeEnabled"=dword:00000000
"CloudPrintProxyEnabled"=dword:00000000
"CloudPrintSubmitEnabled"=dword:00000001
"DefaultBrowserSettingEnabled"=dword:00000000
"DefaultGeolocationSetting"=dword:00000001
"DiskCacheDir"="C:\\Windows\\Temp"
"DiskCacheSize"=dword:06400000
"DnsPrefetchingEnabled"=dword:00000001
"EditBookmarksEnabled"=dword:00000000
"HideWebStorePromo"=dword:00000001
"HomepageLocation"="http://www.google.co.uk/"
"HomepageIsNewTabPage"="false"
"ImportBookmarks"=dword:00000000
"ImportHistory"=dword:00000000
"ImportHomepage"=dword:00000000
"ImportSavedPasswords"=dword:00000000
"ImportSearchEngine"=dword:00000000
"IncognitoModeAvailability"=dword:00000001
"InstantEnabled"=dword:00000001
"MetricsReportingEnabled"=dword:00000000
"PasswordManagerEnabled"=dword:00000000
"ProxyMode"="system"
"RestoreOnStartup"=dword:00000004
"SafeBrowsingEnabled"=dword:00000001
"SavingBrowserHistoryDisabled"=dword:00000001
"SearchSuggestEnabled"=dword:00000001
"ShowHomeButton"=dword:00000001
"TranslateEnabled"=dword:00000001

[sonofsanta]

We've just started using it, as you say the GPO's are a bit time consuming to get right, almost there with it now just need to block "sign in and sync" "sign-in-to-your-account" how did you get around this? Our Smoothwall blocks the gmail webmail side of things but the "sign in and sync" is still allowed. Also had a quick go at blocking "chrome://" and "chrome://signin" but no joy, and there doesn't seem to be any settings in GPO for anything "sync".

 

Google > Google Chrome > Restrict which users are allowed to sign into Chrome = "*@iamnotadomainiamadummy.stupid" (or placeholder of your choice)

[mthomas08]

As tempted as I have been to use other browsers - I have been tempted to allow user choices etc but then I remember things work at the moment

[witch]

Well, I managed it with the help of some threads on here:

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/internet-related-filtering-firewall/104771-google-chrome-homepage.html#post898256

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/internet-related-filtering-firewall/105190-installing-google-chrome-network-2.html

And lots of help from lots of people on here

 

If I can do it, it can't be that hard