great things about Google Apps, but one thing we found lacking was the stock
administrator tools. While Google has improved the stock admin tools
significantly since Sept 2008, they still are lacking in a number of ways.
To fill in the gap I used the Google API to create a site to supplement the
stock admin tools. Our site currently does the following:
- Allows you to change a username (e.g. due to marriage). The stock tools
allow you to change the display name, but not the username.
- While the stock tools allow small domains to export a user list as a
CSV, this option does not seem to be available for larger domains (at least
not our domain), and even for small domains you can't export group
membership information. Our site allows you to export all users, and if you
don't mind waiting 5 minutes for the export to complete, you can also export
all group memberships for each user.
- We still find the group management tools cumbersome, so I built a page
dedicated to managing groups making adding/deleting/modifying members in
groups as easy as pasting email addresses into a test box.
Since all Google Apps domains use the same API, it was trivial to add the
functionality to our site to allow it to be used to manage any Google Apps
domain; therefore, I decided to open it up for any school or non-profit use.
If you administer a Google Apps domain for a school or non-profit and would
like to use our site, please send me an email
(tphelan@peddie.org<tphelan@peddie.org?Subject=GoogleAppsAdmin_Request>)
or give me a call (609-944-7625) requesting that I add your domain to the
list of allowed domains. *Please DO NOT send me your administrator password!
*
The URL for the site which includes more information about the site is:
http://webapps.peddie.org/GoogleAppsAdmin/
--
Tom Phelan
Director of Technology
Peddie School
tphelan@peddie.org
Office: 609-944-7625
[ For info on ISED-L see https://www.gds.org/podium/default.aspx?t=128874 ]
Submissions to ISED-L are released under a creative commons, attribution, non-commercial, share-alike license.
RSS Feed, http://listserv.syr.edu/scripts/wa.exe?RSS&L=ISED-L
