Frequently Asked Questions

Below are a number of the questions we frequently get about BetterCloud products. If we haven’t answered your question with the following information, feel free to send us an email at info@bettercloud, and we will get back to you with an answer as soon as possible.

DomainWatch

SherpaTools

ArchiveMigrator

DomainWatch

How does DomainWatch makes Google Apps more secure?
DomainWatch is the solution to all your security questions. The program allows you to set alerts for certain types of activities, so you can control how Google Apps is utilized. You can set alerts for certain employees, accessing information in certain areas or even if in an confidential site was accessed outside of an organizational unit. After you set the alerts you want, DomainWatch sends you a list of violations, allowing you to correct any issues.

One of the biggest concerns of most companies is sharing documents pubilcly. You can set parameters on DomainWatch that will notify you if anyone shares a Google Doc, Site, or Calendar out to the public. For some documents it might be okay, or for others you might give specific directions not to ever share it publicly as it contains proprietary information. With DomainWatch, you instantly know so you can stop the offense before it becomes a problem.

Why should I be worried about sharing Google Calendars?
Google Calendars are a very effective way for your organization to coordinate and keep track of schedules. The interface and permissions allow for easy sharing of calendars and the viewing of multiple calendars at once, so that if you desire, you can view your team members’ calendars along side your own. Going to stop by your manager’s office? Check his or her calendar first to make sure they are not in a meeting. This kind of information sharing keeps your organization efficient and productive.

The ease of sharing Google Calendars, however, comes with an equivalent amount of risk. Google Calendars can actually be made public, where they will be indexed by search engines like Google and thus be discoverable by anyone on the web. Certain calendars, such as internal project calendars for sensitive projects, or calendars of high-level executives, may contain highly confidential information that must stay within the company. DomainWatch allows you to control the sharing permissions of each individual user, or organizational unit if you prefer, so that only those who need public sharing capabilities will have them.

What are some risks of sharing Google Sites?
Google Sites is an excellent tool for creating project or team sites, as well as company intranets. Some people use Google Sites to build public websites, but the true power of Google is fully realized with intranets or extranets as you can then leverage all of the permissioning capabilities. Not only can you grant access to specific users and groups, but you can also refine that access down to the page level. Have one page that only your executive team should see? That’s easy. One page that only your side of the project team should see? Once again, easy.

But with this hosting of such confidential information comes security risks. Anyone who has full permission to access the Google Site also has permission to share that Site out to other Google users, or even to the public at large. Obviously, this is a problem that needs to be addressed before it becomes an issue, and DomainWatch allows you to do that. You can restrict certain users from sharing Google Sites publicly, but still give them full edit/access permissions with the Site. DomainWatch allows your organization to harness the full capabilities of Google Sites in a secure and safe manner.

What are some risks of sharing Google Docs?
Google Docs is one of the most popular apps in the Google Apps suite. It is incredibly convenient to be able to update a document and have that update show up immediately for all coworkers shared on the document. Being able to work collaboratively on a document, showcasing changes and making sure everyone is up to date saves time, paper and errors in distribution. Once a document is shared, the entire group gets a notice immediately, keeping the flow of information consistent and accurate.

However, the effortless sharing of Google Docs poses a security risk. At the click of a button, your company’s most sensitive information could be shared with the wrong employee, customer, or competitor. While you can work to control this behavior by setting sharing, viewing, and editing permissions, these are all set at the document level and thus are difficult for an administrator to control. DomainWatch allows you to control all of this activity from an administrator level, and thus give your users full access to the power of Google Docs with the peace of mind that nothing can go wrong.

How secure is Google Docs?
How secure is Google Docs? In a word, extremely. When your organization stores its sensitive information on Google Docs, you can rest assured it is maintained on secure servers in Google’s state-of-the-art datacenters. From a digital security standpoint, Google Docs is much safer than storing your data locally, as Google’s protection software is much more advanced than that of almost all private servers.

But Google Docs is also very powerful from a sharing and collaboration perspective. To secure the user side of information flow, training your employees will only go so far. Employees will eventually make mistakes, leaving documents shared with contractors or adding internal events to public calendars, regardless of their level of skill in Google Docs. Fortunately, DomainWatch stops these mistakes, and has tools that will help prevent them in the future.

SherpaTools

What is delegated administration in SherpaTools?
It can be a bit difficult to grant people full administrative rights in Google Apps. This has to do with the fact that giving people total control over a domain has a lot of potential security implications. This could result in a number of problems over time from an IT security perspective.

While you are able to do some delegation within the standard Google Apps administrative console, you can do much more with a third party product. SherpaTools is an example of this since it is especially geared towards really diving into user-specific roles and access delegation.

The use of delegation puts to good use scopes and organizational units, which are also known as (OUs) from within a Google Apps domain. With delegated administration in Google Apps, you are able to assign non-IT personnel the ability to perform administrative tasks such as password resets or adding nicknames.

I’m new to Google Apps, what does an administrator typically do?
Administration of Google Apps is an important element of using it in terms of management. So what are some of the top issues that being a Google Apps Administrator involves?

The top areas of focus are: account management, contacts management, spam protection, providing enough training and support for new users, and choosing complementary software such as modern browsers and third-party applications from the Google Apps marketplace.

Why is SherpaTools better than the Control Panel?
SherpaTools allows for additional functionality that is not possible within the Control Panel, such as shared contacts across the domain, and more granular delegated administration through the use of Roles and Scopes.

While much of what’s possible in SherpaTools is also possible through the Control Panel, SherpaTools provides a more intuitive interface and allows administrators to perform tasks and functions faster than going directly through the Control Panel. Don’t believe us? Check out our reviews – sherpatools.com/marketplace.

How do shared contacts work in SherpaTools?
Google Apps has its own data store where contacts are kept. Let’s call this the Google corporate contacts list. Shared Contacts are a part of this list. When you create Shared Contacts in SherpaTools, we use the Google APIs to edit the Google corporate contacts list. However, Shared Contacts can sometimes take as long as 24 hours to appear in this because of how Google re-indexes this list. It’s not always 24 hours — sometimes its quite a bit sooner — but it’s rarely immediate. So, even though the newly-created Shared Contacts are visible in the local SherpaTools datastore right away, it can be a day before your users see them in their type-ahead lists and in their To: search fields.

There are two ways to upload shared contacts:

  1. From personal contacts. In April 2011, SherpaTools introduced the ability for Administrators (and authorized delegates) to create new Shared Contacts by uploading personal contacts. More information can be found here.
  2. From a spreadsheet. You can enter shared contact data into a Google Docs spreadsheet and import it. More information can be found here.

ArchiveMigrator

Do my PST and NSF files need to be unstubbed?
Yes. For ArchiveMigrator to transfer your files to Google Message Discovery, all files will need to be unstubbed.

Stubbed files contain references to data in another system. So files need to be unstubbed to ensure that they contain all the information that needs to be uploaded to Google Message Discovery.

If you need more information on how to ensure that your files are unstubbed and ready for upload, just give us a call at 888-999-0905.

Can I upload emails that are currently in Gmail but not in Google Message Discovery?
Yes. This is called “Gmail ingestion,” and is easily accomplished with ArchiveMigrator.

We first use the Google Apps Audit API to request the downloads, down the files and decrypt them. After that, ArchiveMigrator can read the files and ingest them directly into Google Message Discovery.

Can ArchiveMigrator work with the email file formats my organization used previously?
Yes. ArchiveMigrator was designed to work with the email formats used by virtually every organization. These formats are PST (Microsoft), NSF (Lotus Notes) and mbox (Gmail).

Regardless of which file format you were using, ArchiveMigrator seamlessly converts it into mbox, the file format used in Google Message Discovery. So all of the critical data in your original files is preserved.

Is ArchiveMigrator proven?
Yes. ArchiveMigrator has been used to migrate hundreds of thousands of mailboxes.

Why do I need ArchiveMigrator?
There are two main reasons you should use ArchiveMigrator to move all of your email archives into Google Message Discovery:

  1. Cloud Storage/Archiving Benefits — ArchiveMigrator lets you move all of your emails into the cloud. So they are safely stored off site—yet easily accessible wherever and whenever you need them. Cloud storage also allows you to eliminate the expense of maintaining the equipment necessary for storing old emails on site.
  2. Google Message Discovery Benefits — ArchiveMigrator consolidates your email archives into Google Message Discovery. So you can easily search for emails by subject, sender,recipient, date, content or other parameters. Google Message Discovery is also easily scalable. And since it doesn’t require any hardware, it is easily managed and maintained.