Does anyone use Google Suite through their school to manage the team? We have been using the e-mail, Drive, and a public calendar, but have used Discord for chat and video meetings. Google has Chat, Spaces, and Meet that seem able to do all the same things. We are looking to see if these can meet team needs, and would appreciate any experiences there.
We (2052) have our own Google Workspace (formerly GSuite) separate from the school. We are on the free nonprofit tier and have used it for over 10 years.
Here are the features we use:
- Mentors and captains get their own @team2052.com email addresses
- Our team calendar is in our Google Workspace domain so mentors & captains have access to manage it
- We have three shared drives on the plan so that we don’t need to worry about transferring file ownership from year to year. One for the full team, one for captains + mentors, and one just for mentors
We don’t use chat or spaces - we have a free nonprofit Slack tier and have loved using Slack.
We also don’t use Meet on our team plan - when we need to do virtual meetings we typically have used Meet on the school district’s plan because they have a higher tier with more functionality (and because we don’t give everyone on the team an @team2052.com account - just way too much work for everyone).
2 Likes
We looked into fully adopting G Suite as our school uses it for EVERYTHING. We quickly abandoned the idea though when it was made clear Mentors wouldn’t have easy access to any of the features.
We instead use Slack for all team communication, and the students/teachers still use Google Drive for simple file sharing. Even the file sharing is annoying though as accounts from outside the organization need to be given permission for each individual file if they want to access (can’t just share a single folder and give them access to everything within).
3468 Uses Gsuite through the school, though we do have the same issues @cad321 listed of mentors not having access to it…
2 Likes
Mentors don’t/can’t have access to the school GSuite here either so we went with a self hosted mattermost.
We are similar to @Bryan_Herbst. We have long had our own G Suite / Google Workspace under the nonprofit plan, as we’re an independent 501(c)3 nonprofit not associated with a school. That provides email addresses under our organization for all mentors and students who have a need; our policy is not to create an account by default just to minimize overhead, but we’ll set one up the first time a student needs it. We also make extensive use of shared drives to store organization documents - users are discouraged from storing team materials in their “My Drive” as the whole point is to have shared access. (Some users are better about this than others…) And we have a shared calendar.
For collaboration, Slack has been a good fit for us; the channel organization aligns well with the way we work, and having most channels public encourages openness in discussions. We’re on the unlimited nonprofit plan (thank you, Slack!). Small person-to-person chats can be done in Slack but team or larger group meetings are generally in Zoom, as several of our mentors have Zoom access through work or school that they can use to set up meetings. If we didn’t have that we’d probably explore the Google option more deeply, though my experiences with it in other contexts have generally been “less good” than Zoom and others.
FWIW, I have a deep dislike of Discord and would never recommend it. It does not structure information in a way that lends itself to thoughtful discussion (no threads) or to later access of useful information.
3 Likes
If your school’s Google for Education platform permits sharing with non-organization users, it works very well. All students on the team already have accounts and are familiar with all of the tools. We can share entire folder hierarchies with mentors (external to the organization) and we can add mentors to Google Chat Spaces as long as we configure them to accept external users. We don’t use Meet so much anymore as we have access to Zoom, but when we did in the past it worked well.
The only issue has been what happens to files owned by students when they graduate and their accounts are deleted. In the past, we had some issues and had to have students run a script to transfer owernership of team files to a special team account. Howerver, this hasn’t been an issue for the past few years. We still have files “owned” by students who have graduated but these files are still accessible in our shared folder. I’m not sure what IT changed to enable this, but we like it!
1 Like
We use GSuite through our school. We’ve got it set up for our email addresses as well. Google Groups is great for handling external communications (keeps students personal addresses hidden, copies mentors on every email). Team Drives are great for all of our team docs (and we were the first group in the school to create templates to help manage our branding!). We use email for all communications (The school doesn’t support any of the various chat systems), and the school’s zoom account for virtual meetings.
This is why we use Team Drive’s. With them, the file is owned by the drive, not by the individual, so you don’t have to worry about losing access. It really only works if you can get everyone to have an account in the organization, though! We’ve been fortunate that the school gives all of the mentors full accounts. For anyone who might be struggling with that, encourage your school to look at it from a YPP perspective - by keeping everything in house, it gives them the ability to ensure nothing hinky is going on. With personal emails the school doesn’t control, they have no ability to monitor anything! We have rules on copying additional adults on every email with a student, and it’s something that can be easily monitored by the school since we’re all using school emails.
2 Likes
We use Microsoft for everything now. We used to slack and google and even Facebook for team organization a long time ago. We love teams, best video conferencing software I’ve used, great for DMs, you can setup as many sub-teams and channels as you want. Every has office 365 and we can share all our files with teams. I found all the individual features to be great, but more importantly, it keeps everything in one place for all communications and organization. I don’t know what if anything we pay for it, but I highly recommend Teams if you’re interested.
Tell me more…
We piggyback off of my alumni (college) Gsuite account but I’d love to get out of using my personal account.
The free nonprofit plan includes email, Meets with up to 100 people, and 30GB storage per user (but pro tip- shared drives are unlimited).
You do need to provide proof of tax exempt status (typically you wouldn’t qualify by being affiliated with a school, you need to have your own 501(c)(3) or similar).
It sounds like you are doing what we have been doing for a few years. It works pretty well.
School shared drives are good. Make sure that you trust the people who have full control over your drive tho. We had a problem in 2019 where we lost our data due to a conflict and someone deleted the drive. I would recommend having an archive shared drive that you put previous year’s data in and everyone but a mentor has view only. School shared drives have up to 100GB, and you can make a bunch of them if you have a lot of things to store.
Discord is what we use for almost all communications. The ownership of the discord is passed to each captain and they appoint a few admins to help (usually the subgroup leads). One major problem is that discord is blocked on the school computers, so we also use email occasionally. We have channels for each subgroup and a few general channels for discussion.
This is pretty much our exact same use case. An easy way to manage file sharing in google shared drives is to make google groups for your mentors, students and parents.
2 Likes
As others have mentioned, Team Drives are the answer. However, with some coordination with your organization’s Google Workspace Administrator, you can transfer ownership of the contents of someone else’s drive when their account is sunsetted. My guess is there is a current policy in place that prevents this, but if you explain your use case, they may be able to accommodate.
This goes to my large point on this and everything else: communicate with IT, befriend IT, collaborate with IT. Working around IT may appear beneficial in the short term, but it’ll always come back to bite you in the long term.
We are affiliated with a non profit so this just might work. Do you know if you can only have one domain affiliation or multiple?
If you’re a registered charity look into Techsoup which is a clearing house for cheap and free software etc.
1 Like
Yes! Didn’t mention it in my original post, but we do make extensive use of Google Groups for both email distribution lists and access control for the shared drives.
I believe you can link multiple domains to one Google Workspace (brief search says up to 20), but I also haven’t tried it myself!
3 Likes
Yay–this is excellent news! We aren’t our own non-profit—we’re the STEM branch of an existing one so we’d need to share this with them.
You have one primary Google Workspace (Suite) domain, but you can have multiple “user alias domains”. So using us as an example: our primary domain is littletonrobotics.org. We have aliased domains (that we own and pay for) team6328.org, team6328.com, frc6328.org, frc6328.com. Users log into services (email, Drive, etc.) using the primary domain but can receive email under their same username @ any of the aliases.
Google also supports secondary domains where it’s a different domain with a different set of users. This is, obviously, more complex, and I can’t comment much on it as we do not use this functionality. It’s also not immediately clear to me whether this is available under the nonprofit plan. I vaguely recall it being an option when I set ours up, I think… if this is of interest to you, you should delve into Google’s documentation to find out more.
By the way, in addition to domain aliases, you can also have email aliases for specific users (set up by your Google administrator), which also work on any of the aliased domains. So if your organization naming policy is [email protected] you can set up aliases to receive email at [email protected], [email protected], etc. You can’t log into services with those names, though, and they are not separate accounts - email to them goes to the same inbox as the account they are aliased to.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.