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We have noticed today that the dialogue box that appears when you deprovision a Chromebook has changed. The order of the choice for reasons for deprovisioning a has changed. The "Same Model Replacement" and "retiring from Fleet" options have switched places on the dialogue. It would be very easy to accidentally retire a Chromebook, and consequently lose a licence if you do a lot of deprovisioning, and haven't noticed the order change.

Having some trouble when creating new users in Google Admin, lately (not sure if there's been some change made) when we create a new user for our organization, the new user isn't visible when searched for in Classroom or Gmail, they only appear after the user has logged on. Has anyone else seen this and if so is there some setting I can change that will change it?Thanks.

Hello Everyone. The school I am working for hasn't been using a shared drive for the past 2 or 3 years. All of their documents are shared out of multiple my drives. One member of staff has all of the schools curriculum docs sorted into one folder in her My Drive, This contains multiple different levels of permissions, owners, shortcuts etc. Is there a way for the Google Admin account to override all of these permissions/owners and just move this folder onto the shared drive. All documents are owned by accounts that are in our google domain. I'm sure you can imagine I do not want to do this manually as there is around 800gb of documents. Thanks in advance

I know I could search the internet high and low for suggestions, but I was wondering if there are any settings, app-level or global, that you have discovered on your travels that you would consider essential for your Google Apps. From my own experience there have definitely been a few things we have found out the hard way! I’ve included a couple of examples below to kick things off: 1) Release Track https://support.google.com/a/answer/172177?hl=en The default setting for when users receive new features is scheduled release, at least 1 week after release. With Google adding new features all the time (particularly to Meet) I have changed this to ‘rapid release’ to get the latest updates asap. I have had several colleagues asking me why/how we managed to get [feature] before their friend’s school which always makes you look good! 2) Google Meet - Telephony https://support.google.com/meet/answer/9518557?hl=en-GB This is a classic example of something that I wish I had come across as a pre-emptive strike rather than finding out the hard way. We had a student who was having technical issues so she dialled the (US) number on the Google Meet page on all her lessons for a whole week and ran up a huge (£2,000+) phone bill! This was as much the fault of the mobile provider IMO for waiting until the bill was this massive before contacting, and they have subsequently waved the bill, but we have now turned this feature off to avoid any further dramas. There’s dozens more examples I could share and I may well do if there’s an obvious demand but I’m interested to know what you have discovered on your travels and what you think would be an essential setting change for all schools using Google Apps. I look forward to hearing your responses

Hi all, I hope everyone is ok. Thought I would ask on here, as I am sure someone can provide some feedback etc. I have really been exploring GCPW at my school recently and.... I really like it. They are a google school with about 300+ 1:1 chromebooks for the students. The staff use windows devices but mainly use Google Drive for documents rather than saving anything on the server. I am looking to explore the options that Windows Device Management (G-suite console) could bring with managing these last few windows devices. On our fundamentals licensing we don't have access to any of this (Only GCPW) but long term, I would like to think I could manage these devices through GCPW and WDM too, all from the google admin console. This would allow us to remove on-prem hardware. I suppose my real question is pricing... would anyone mind sharing how much they paid for their upgraded licensing to either standard or plus? I have had a rough look around and it seems that for standard it is about £2 per student... but with every four licenses you get a free staff license. I'm not sure how much persuading our school would need to purchase this licensing, as currently they are on a free plan, and only pay for device upgrade licenses. But I do think the benefits it would bring to the school are worth it for the long run. TIA.

Hello I have GCDS running, all working amazing, but when our school AD accounts are disabled e.g. Student or Staff has left, this change does not go up to Google so their account is still enabled. Google support can't understand what I am trying to do! These are the settings below: Thanks Billy

Working on a simple one-stop policy guide for admins to correctly setup and secure their chrome devices without the hassle. The current version is at https://GitHub.com/vcc3v/chromeSEC I would love to hear any feedback/recommendations you may have! please star the repo if you find it useful.

I am trying to find a way to create/update an email group in Google Workspace for Education Plus. My administrators want to email the students based on their graduation year. Last year I created a [email protected] address with members and the administrators loved it. Dynamic groups will work but only for the school year. If I create a dynamic group using the (user.org_unit_id==orgUnitId('grade_6')) and name it "2031" it will import students from the grade_6 OU and create the [email protected] email address. Great for quickly creating a "distribution list". But, the following school year those student move on and the next class get mapped to the [email protected] email address. I haven't found a way around this. Is there a way to use GAM to manually create an email group based on OU? I realize this will need to be manually run at the beginning of the school year. Anything would be faster than using the admin console.

Hi All, We have 2fa enabled but not currently enforced for our users but several of them that use multiple computers have to authenticate each device sometimes multiple times a day despite 'trusting this device'. e.g Login to computer A -trust & authenticate, move to computer B - trust and authenticate, move back to computer A have to trust and authenticate again. Cookies are enabled, not using private mode, not set to delete browsing history/cache/cookies on exit. AD Profile is the same as all our other users. Have so far tried the following: Cleared Google profile Open another browser (Edge, Firefox, Safari) Go to your Google Account and sign in From the account page, on the left choose Security Scroll down to 'your devices' Sign out of all devices listed Sign out of your Google account Before signing back in; Open Chrome Go to settings (3 dots top right) In the 'search settings' bar type in 'cookies' Click on 'clear browsing data' Click on 'advanced' From the dropdown choose 'all time' Make sure all boxes are ticked Click on 'clear data' Now open a new webpage and search for 'Google Account' sign back in making sure to tick the 'Remember this device' checkbox and authenticate. Seems to be an issue on Chrome only (I know the obvious would be to just use Edge or W/E instead but they like Chrome) Google have so far suggested the above as a fix... just hoping someone here may have encountered this before and found a fix? Could it be something in their appdata? We havent enforced MFA yet so they have disabled it to avoid having to keep authenticateing on the PCs .. but need to find a fix before it is enforced! any and all help appreciated! Kind regards, Adam

Hi all, Currently evaluating our backup options for our central google tenant. I will be installing a NAS box with active backup capabilities so that it covers on-site, but I was wondering what people use cloud wise for their backups? There seem to be so many options, acronis, backupify, afi, redstore, spanning, cubebackup etc etc. Can anyone offer any information on the above, preferably with pricing? I will be storing about 2.5 terabytes of data, and will probably only look to back up staff accounts and shared drives via the cloud due to costs. Thanks!

Hello All, I have been getting a lot of tickets relating to 'kids playing games in lessons' from staff using the IT Suites (why they arent issuing detentions etc for this I dont know..), so far I have managed quite successfully to block the various websites and keywords however now they have cottoned on that they can use browser extensions to get around this and play games. In Google Admin I have set Devices>Chrome>apps & Extensions>users and browsers> 'Allow/Block mode - Block all apps, admin manages allowlist' and Devices>Chrome>Reports>Apps and Extensions usage - blocking apps here as well. This doesnt seem to be having the desired effect of blocking extensions or preventing access to extensions already installed. I have blocked the URLs for the chrome webstore as well. Any thoughts on why this isnt working? Or advice on how to get rid of user installed extensions? Equally they are doing the same on Edge browser - is there a GPO or such that can be used to prevent browser extentions or the like? Any and all advice welcome! Kind regards, Adam

Hi Everyone, Im having an issue where Google Password sync that is installed on my Domain Contollers is no longer working. When attempting to authorise a Google admin account the 'Continue' button after confirming the account password doesnt seem to work. I have checked that all the required URLS are whitelisted on the firewall and that there is no proxy set on the server. Running the sync tool on a different server works fine but oddly not on our DC's. Has anyone encounted this issue before. I have treid the following; -Checking no proxy is set - Checking the URLS recommended by Google are whitlisted - Changing what browswer is used for the password confirmination. I have attached a screenshot of where I get to when then stalls. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hi All, I was wondering if anyone has fully migrated their schools to Google....? I work in a large primary school with a very "hybrid" set up. The students use Chromebooks, and some of the staff/teachers do to. However, there is still an on-prem DC (that is tired) managing a few windows laptops hosting services such, Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, Printing, and file shares too. My thoughts are to do the following... - Deploy the google drive client on remaining windows devices to sync users files to the workspace - Use papercut mobility print for printing services - Host DNS, and DHCP on firewall. - Use something like Synology Active Backup for workspace, pointing to a NAS off/on site. - They already use Arbor for their MIS so no issues there. - Invest in a redundant FTTC/5G connection in the event of a main line issue. - Senso.Cloud for safeguarding monitoring, and possibly Securly for extra filtering. - Licensing is perpetual, so would be looking at roughly £30 per device - Training provided to staff/students on how to use the Google Workspace apps Please let me know if I have missed anything, as I am sure I have! I am more interested to see if any schools have actually succeeded in migrating fully to Google? How have staff found it? Has there been any software issues? is it even possible? haha!

Looking for best practice on this one. Just taken on a MAT of over a dozen schools. Staff and teachers will all use the same domain to make moves easier. Students will use the individual school's domain. Using ACM to sync SIMS to 365 then use the Google connector to auto provision users to the Google tenant. I now need to find the best way to organise users and devices in Google. I have seen various ways to structure AD in corporate environments but I'm hoping to get peoples thoughts specifically for a MAT's Google tenant. I've outlined below what I have come up with and what has been suggested by others but I'm open to suggestions from someone with experience in this. Many thanks! Site then object (this makes sense at first but then not so much when policies get applied to object types across the MAT): School 1 Users Teachers Students [*]Devices Teacher devices Student devices [*]School 2 Users Teachers Students [*]Devices Teacher devices Student devices Site then user (after writing this I realised it probably isn't ideal): School Teachers users devices [*]Students users devices Object then user (makes sense but the structure will end up being huge with 15 schools): Users Teachers School 1 School 2 [*]Students School 1 School 2 [*]Devices Teacher devices School 1 School 2 [*]Student Devices School 1 School 2 Object then site (I think this is the one might be the better option?): Users School 1 Teachers Students [*]School 2 Teachers Students [*]Devices School 1 Teacher devices Student devices [*]School 2 Teacher devices Student devices My next hurdle is automatically putting the users in the right OUs when 365 provisions them but that's one for another day.