Our company owns about 70 and manages apartment communities across the country. The operations team would like us to purchase a Chromebook for each property for residents and maintenance staff to use, without having to use the main office computer. Our company is growing quickly, and we will likely be adding over a dozen new Chromebooks each year.
We would like to configure each machine the same as the next, with a list of specific shortcuts pinned to the shelf, and a specific home page. However we do not want to use only 1 Google account across all machines, as one password reset would lock everyone else out of their device.
Another issue is that if we create a Google account for each property using their existing email address, we will need someone to verify every account via email.
We have looked into using Google Apps accounts, but that would leave us paying for a lot of features that we simply don’t need. Any recommendations on how to best handle the first-time configuration, and then how to best manage them all going forward?
@Google
3 Spice ups
davidr4
(davidr4)
2
Sounds like you need Google Apps for Work. That is going to be your only real way to manage them all and maintain your accounts . You would enroll them into the Chrome management and manage every feature. You need GAFW though.
Would you put 70 Windows desktops into an office without Active Directory? Sounds like someone saw the price of Chromebooks and set “Lets get them” without really researching.
2 Spice ups
I agree with davidr4, you’re going to need Google Apps for Work. You will then need to setup policies for your Google “OU’s” and add your Chromebooks to them.
Just to butt in to add further support for Google Apps for Work, it won’t be super fast to configure them all, but if you do a bunch at one time, you can go down the line and even alone, with repeating the same steps one by one, get them all done much faster than done them completely one by one. I’ve done this. Some people say it’s not faster, but your brain works better repeating the same action over and over rather than starting from zero each time.
jagowu
(Jago Wu)
5
Not sure if this would help but here is documentation on ChromeBook Migration to Win10 Docs.
https://technet.microsoft.com/itpro/windows/plan/chromebook-migration-guide
Thanks for all of the input. It looks like we are going with Google apps for Work with accounts for each device. We are also looking into Device Management from Google, but we’re not sure if that gives us enough features for the cost.
