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What practices do you use to manage your google drive accounts when people leave? Do you just transfer all documents to a catch all account? Right now we go through and redistribute the shared documents to the correct people or the managers so we can keep the shared files that the user created. Is there a way to manage all the users within my organization in 1 place? Just seems cumbersome to have to transfer all these documents all the time because they are shared with other users. Hoping for a better way to manage that.

18 Spice ups
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IMHO it’s not an enterprise solution because of the reasons you list; If it were me, I’d look for something a little more “enterprise friendly”

With that being said, I don’t see any other way than what you describe…hopefully someone else knows of one.

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I understand. Unfortunately when I came on board here they were already using google mail/apps so I’ve just been managing it. We don’t have huge turnover here but I know as some of the older people that have been here 20+ years start retiring i’m going to have my hands full with there drives lol

Wes

4

You have a few options for shared/central storage drives.

  1. You can create official company shared folders (“HR Share”, “Accounting Share”, “Sales Share”, etc.) under individual users that head those functions. On departure, you can move ownership of the share to the person taking over the role, or if it is a new hire, reuse the account (with some clean up).

  2. You can create the official company shares using one or more central admin accounts (fileservice@…). Yes, you are getting an additional license, but the space is owned by the admin account with permissions shared out. Note that files people create in that space are still owned by them individually, but you don’t need to do a wholesale migration as the FileService account is always an editor. Also, you may run up against the 30GB user limit and need to buy additional storage (not expensive), or go up to Google Apps Unlimited (may be worth the cost for all of the features, or may not be worth it).

  3. AODocs File Server lets you overlay a more traditional file structure onto Google Drive. Centrally owned and managed accounts exist as the AODocs Server. The difference from #2 is that when a user creates or uploads a document, the ownership changes from the User to the AODocs Server and the user is granted Editor rights. The user can still edit and, optionally, manage permissions on the document, but the ownership is now central as well (more like a traditional file server). You have rights inheritance and more granularity as to who can modify, delete, etc.

AODocs adds a cost per user per year (varies based on User count).

Disclaimer/Note: AODocs does not have a green guy/gal in the community, but I can make a personal intro for anybody interested in learning more.

3 Spice ups
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We do not really have standard procedure for that but what I usually do is disable the account and keep it for certain period of time (if it is admin person usually 3 years). Then if anybody needs to access the files of the person who left I enable the account, change the password and give it to the new person who needs it. Make sure you get the management on this and they agree with this procedure, if not then you need to find another solution. Also your current practice is fine too.

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Usually I’ve transferred people’s docs to their manager when they leave. The manager can then manage it from there.

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All of our document get transferred to the main admin account as we know this is the only one that won’t leave and require it to be done again.

If they are shared it doesn’t really matter who the owner is as the share permissions remain and if we need to we can allow managers to co-own the document to manage the sharing further

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All GApps data is backed up using Backupify (now Datto). The Drive files are then transferred to the employee’s manager. The account is deleted and a forwarding group is created to ensure no emails are missed. After 3 months the group is deleted, unless the manager says otherwise.

Works for us and rarely had an issue pulling data out when needed.

@Datto_Inc

4 Spice ups
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@Nelson9480,

Thanks for the mention!

Wes,

Datto’s Backupify solution is perfect for managing both active and departed Google Apps user data from a central platform. One of our main use cases is assisting our customers in being able to easily organize, transfer and control data while still being able to reduce Google Apps license costs.

Our management console makes it easy to browse or search and then granularly restore or transfer data from one user’s Google Drive to another. By backing the data up to the cloud, you can access it when you need it without needing to provide a local storage option or cluttering up another account unnecessarily.

Let me know if you’d like more information.

Best,

-Joe

@Datto_Inc

2 Spice ups
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We generally change the password when a user leaves and give it to the manager. They can then sort out anything they want to keep before we delete the account in 30-60 days. On thing to note is that suspending the account will still leave shared document available which is perhaps not quite intuitive. We’ve had cases where nobody was aware they were using a suspended users shared doc till we deleted the account:)

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We just went to Google Apps/Gmail about a year ago (much against our will), and though this hasn’t been an issue yet, this is one of the first things I brought up as a definite ‘con’ to moving to the platform.

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Bettercloud.com ask them for a demo, they are pretty good and have great options.

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Thanks for all the great replies. I’m highly doubting I can get additional software as out 10 year projection is already in the red. Being a non-profit puts us up against a lot of financial boundaries.

I’m thinking about doing the catch all admin account named fileserver or something along those lines. Seems to be easy for me to access, the shares stay the same and I can finally recover a couple licenses. We generally don’t forward mail for people after they leave and if someone wants and old email that’s that important it should be vaulted anyway.

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BetterCloud is a good solution for moving file ownership with a process that is a bit easier than the admin console for this function.

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Being that you are a non profit, Bettercloud has special pricing for that and may well give you a good deal. There is another company out there called gpanel, they offer something else like bettercloud. check them out too.

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This was actually one of the big reasons I got us a file transporter is the ability for me to control our files when accounts are deleted. Right now its still a manual process but they are going to be enabling a feature to automatically revert ownership to the IT admin on account deletion.

We did look at some of the options mentioned here but what really kills those is the long term cost. I really dislike where IT licensing is going with the monthly subscriptions and subscriptions on top of subscriptions. $2-4/usr/month looks small but once you pay for a hundred or two licenses the price gets expensive really quickly over the course of a year or two and you usually will have your own hardware paid for after 2 yrs.

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Alright you talked me into it, i’m checking out the trail of bettercloud. Waiting for it to sync. So far however I think google should take notes from this app!

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we just transfer all their documents to whom ever their manager says to, and then deactivate the ex employees account.

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We don’t let people use the google drive just for this reason. We have Dropbox for Business, although this is not option for everyone because of cost, it is nice because we have several admins and when people leave we just take there access away / disable the accounts. No need to worry about somebody having access that should not etc.

2 Spice ups
20

Hardware is a small part, what about the software licensing, support, backups, offsite storage, DR, power, cooling, etc. Most of those are monthly or at least reoccurring costs.