Q&A with BetterCloud Support

The Google Apps community is a very collaborative one, with regular activity among Google product forums, Google+ communities, and Google Groups. Not surprisingly, we receive great questions from admins within BetterCloud’s own community forum, as well. We’ve gone through recent support tickets and forum posts in order to share Q&A’s that we thought would be helpful to other BetterCloud users.

For BetterCloud support, visit support.bettercloud.com and open a ticket or chat live with our team.

Our entire K-12 district is under one domain. The middle school would like to turn off the option to share Google Drive documents with anyone outside our organization. From what I see in the admin panel, this can only be done at the top domain level and would impact staff and high school students. Is there a trick to turning off sharing by organization unit?

Yes, there is! I’d first recommend creating an Org. Unit for each grade level (or school, but grouping by grade level makes it easier to move all users in the “8th grade” Org. Unit to the “9th grade” Org. Unit at the end of the year, rather than finding each graduating 8th grader in a “Middle School” Org. Unit).

That way, you’ll be able to create Drive sharing policies by Org. Unit using BetterCloud. So, you could set liberal sharing for staff and high school students, then prohibit external sharing for middle school students and automatically correct sharing violations.

In the Docs Exposed Publicly Report, what is the difference between “Public” and “External Public” in the exposure category?

Good question, this may be confusing since there is there is no external designator when changing sharing settings from within a document. Public sharing means a document is accessible to anyone, whereas External | Public means that a document is exposed publicly AND shared specifically with a user or users external to the domain.

We included this within BetterCloud because of a specific use case–if you choose to change the sharing settings of a document from public to private, doing so will not remove collaborators explicitly added, which is to say that the external collaborator(s) would still have access, perhaps unintentionally.

Read the support article for all Drive sharing settings.

We just got hit by a snowstorm and closed our doors for the day. Can I set up an out of office for everyone?

One of the many benefits of Google Apps is being able to work from anywhere, but snow days happen. In BetterCloud, if you navigate to Tools > Email Tools > Auto-Reply, you can set an out of office message for some or all of your users. Just select the start and end dates, write the subject and body of the email, and in the next step you can select users.

If you have more than one office location, apply the auto-reply by Org. Unit or to individual users (instead of everyone) so the message won’t apply to users not affected by the storm.

I just installed BetterCloud, but am worried that when I looked in the Admin Console, it says the app is “On for everyone.” Does that mean all users will be able to use BetterCloud? How do I limit it to only IT?

Rest assured, full access to BetterCloud is only available to super administrators. (You can use Access Controls to create specific roles for non-admin users.)

Being said, all users will be able to log into BetterCloud, but only to view a limited End User portal. Users can view directory information including their profile, group memberships, and shared contacts. If enabled by an admin, users can self-edit designated fields of their own profiles, which is helpful for updating information that can change frequently (like a new cell phone number or address).

You can disable the end user view for some or all users in the Google Admin Console.