View and Correct Data Sharing for Google Apps

This post is part of Google Apps Admin Awareness Month, our month-long series where we spotlight a different tip for Google Apps administrators every day in July. Have a tip to share with your peers or have you always wondered how to do something in Google Apps? Let us know on Twitter @bettercloud.

When Do I Need to View and Correct Data Sharing?
When an employee leaves your organization, amicably or otherwise, it’s important to reassign asset ownership and examine the sharing settings of those assets. Often times, a departing employee will have confidential company documents shared with a personal Gmail account, and it’s important to disable this type of sharing to keep the assets secure.

How Do I Verify and Correct Data Sharing?
To manually verify and correct data sharing, you must reassign a departing user’s assets, which can only be done in bulk, through the Google Apps Control Panel (or our alternative, FlashPanel). After the assets have been reassigned, you can examine and change the sharing settings on each document by clicking the ‘Share’ button in the right hand corner.

For a more granular approach, third-party applications in the Google Apps Marketplace come in handy. These tools, including our product DomainWatch, can alert you to sharing policy violations, and also allow you to only transfer ownership on a single asset or group of assets rather than the user’s entire backlog. You can transfer these assets to different people, so that if the employee worked with a team, you can easily transfer ownership of different assets to all of the right team members.

Why Should I View and Correct Data Sharing?
Regardless of the size of your organization, it is hard to monitor the flow of documents and information both internally and externally. The ease with which documents can be shared has increased exponentially thanks to the rapid adoption of technology like Google Apps, and therefore protection of private company documents is of utmost importance. We recommend analyzing your entire domain on a scheduled basis to maintain a high level of security.

About Google Apps Admin Awareness Month

At BetterCloud, we’ve seen first hand the impact Google Apps can have on a business: extreme cost cutting, streamlined management processes, enhanced collaboration and mobility and much more.

During our time as an independent software provider focused 100% on the Google Apps platform, we’ve interacted with thousands of organizations using Google Apps and realized that so many helpful features of the platform go unused by administrators.

This July, we’re devoting the BetterCloud blog to educating Google Apps administrators on the wide array of tips, tricks and features available in the platform. These features not only add crucial functionality, but save you time and effort!