our Google Apps Admin Tools
<https://webapps.peddie.org/GoogleAppsAdmin>page which we have made
available to any Google Apps school or non-profit
upon request.
While generally a very positive thing, when Google Apps migrated from
mailing lists to full fledged Google Groups a very annoying by-product was
that domain groups stopped being shared to the domain so our users lost
type-ahead ability for groups. The official solution to this problem is to
create a shared contact (click
here<http://code.google.com/googleapps/faq.html#shared_contacts>for
Google's description of contact types) for each group you want to
share.
The problem is that the standard admin console doesn't provide the ability
to manage shared contacts, you have to use the API. Since I already had to
learn the API (see my original below) I decided to just add the ability to
manage shared contacts to our custom admin page rather than pay for a third
party tool or use a tool still in beta.
As explained below in my original email, any school or non-profit is welcome
to use my site, just send me an email with your Google Apps domain and I'll
add your school to the list of authorized domains. Note that the site does a
few other useful things which still can't be done using the stock admin
console such as change a username. Again, please read my original message
below.
--
Tom Phelan
Director of Technology
Peddie School
Co-Manager, Independent School Educator's Listserv (ISED-L)
tphelan@peddie.org
==========
ORIGINAL EMAIL SEND DECEMBER 2009
We migrated to Google Apps back in September 2008 and there are a lot of
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 possible to add the
functionality to this 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 this site, please send me an email (tphelan@peddie.org) 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. While we
use this site to manage the Peddie domain and I know of no bugs, no warranty
is expressed or implied. Also, please do read the instructions at the bottom
of each page before using the page.
The URL for the site which includes more information about the site is:
http://webapps.peddie.org/GoogleAppsAdmin/
[ 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.
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