How to Configure and Manage a Google Apps Domain
By John DeWolfIn our first blog post, we walked you though how to use the Google Apps Setup Wizard to make the simplest, most straightforward domain setup a quick and easy process. Now that we have the basic setup complete, it’s time to start customizing Google Apps to meet the specific needs of your business.
User Management
Google Tutorial Link: Manage User Accounts
You can create users manually, in bulk or via invitation, but it’s usually a best practice to configure all the services and security on your domain before adding or inviting users. This way, users can’t take actions you intend to restrict later, or bump up against security controls you intend to relax as you configure your domain settings. Finish building out your domain before you let anyone move in.
Once you’ve added your full roster of users to your Google Apps domain, you have a number of options to help manage these accounts. This video gives a brief overview of a Google Apps domain administrator’s basic user management controls.
Rename a User
Google Tutorial Link: Rename a User
Every Google Apps user has two names: a display name and user name. Let’s take a certain famous fictional journalist as an example. Lois Lane has an email address lois.lane@ dailyplanet.com. The user name is the portion of the email address that appears before the @ sign, lois.lane. The display name is the name that Ms. Lane chooses to associate with that address, Lois Lane. Users control their own display names; administrators control the user names.
As an administrator, you can create an email alias for [email protected] that routes mail to Lois’s original account, but she would still log in under her original user name.
If Lois wants to change her user name, her account must be renamed. Before you rename any user accounts, be sure to read Google’s warnings about the impact of renaming a Google Apps user.
Suspend a User
GOOGLE TUTORIAL LINK: Suspend a User
From time to time, you may need to lock a user out of his Google Apps account. A user cannot log into a suspended Google Apps account, and that account cannot receive emails or accept Google Calendar invitations. All the data in a suspended account remains intact, and any Google Drive files owned by a suspended user are still accessible to collaborators.
Delete a User
GOOGLE TUTORIAL LINK: Delete a User
When you delete a Google Apps user, you delete all the data owned by that user – emails, calendar events, contacts, and documents – permanently. You also lose access to any Marketplace apps for which the deleted user was the administrator.
There are a number of recommended steps to take before you delete a Google Apps user, but they all come down to one objective: Retain the data in the deleted account. There are four schools of thought on how to retain data before you delete a Google Apps user:
- Google has a grab-bag of methods for downloading or transferring data out of each individual Google App
- Maintain an automated, online backup of the data in the Google Apps account with a service like Backupify for Google Apps
We hope you found this post helpful. If you’d like to read the complete guide to Setting up your Google Apps Domain, please download the eBook below.
