At first, this may seem a bit chaotic, but in the long run it will bring improvements to the organization, especially for two reasons. The first is that changing people in office will be much better. And the second is that the person holding a position will have much more organized documents and mail.
And even more so, considering that these mails are not only used for the mail but also for all Google services.
Teachers should be well trained to know which mail to use at all times. I insist, not only to send mails but also to share documents. But if we do, we’ll avoid a lot of permit changes and lost documents.
Access all documents previously created by the position user.
Edit documents that, as a teacher, I only had permission to view.
Modify Google Groups where the charge user is the owner.
View and modify sites that have been created with the user in the position.
Modify calendars that I could only view as a teacher.
It is important to highlight teacher training when sharing files. It is necessary to be very clear if it is shared with a teacher or with the position held by a teacher, because if it is mixed, then chaos can be monumental.
For example, if the director of a center is a teacher of Natural Sciences, we must use his nominal mail (nombreprofesor@nombreinstituto.es) for those mail and documents internal to the department. It would also be a good idea to use the teacher’s nominal mail to share information with students. By contrast, the post office user should be used by post and site organization documents, direccion@nombreinstituto.es.
Having Google Drive well organized, using groups to share documentation and calendars and using users for fees, the start of the course should be very simple, and we should not have any problem with people and charges that do not have permission to view documents or calendars they need.
Groups can be created there, which are nothing more than user lists. For example, we could create a group of teachers from all the faculty at claustre@nombreinstituto.es.
These groups allow for several functions, but the most common are two: 1) Sending emails to many people by entering only one address 2) Sharing documents and calendars with many people with one address.
This second feature is the one I will deal with in this article.
First, a note. If a user creates groups, these groups are only seen by him. Therefore, each teacher should create his or her own groups. This would mean that working with groups would be impractical, since every time there is an incorporation all teachers should modify the groups.
If you have Google apps for education, these groups can be created by the administrator. This way, all users in the organization can use them and only one person needs to do the maintenance. In addition, the administrator can designate for each group an owner user, who will be responsible for administering it.
What are the peculiarities of sharing with groups?
Sharing with groups is very simple. We enter the document we want to share, choose the Share button and add the e-mail address of the group. All members will receive the link by email and have access.
The problem arises when someone is added to a group. Suppose a new student or a long-term substitute teacher arrives. The corresponding administrator enters the corresponding group and adds the new user.
The problem is that, even though the new user is in the group and despite the group having shared documents, the new user does not have access.
I don’t know what the reason for this is, but I talked to the people at Google Ireland and they confirmed it to me. When a document is shared (same with calendars) with a group, group members will only have access if the first time they access through the link.
This, the first time it usually happens, as the document link is sent by mail to everyone. But if someone deleted the mail without following the link, it would be the same as new users. As much as I wanted, I couldn’t access the document. Searching for it with the search tool would not work, nor would searching for it in the All Documents folder.
Once you follow the link once, then it appears in the search engine and in the All Documents folder, but not before.
What solutions do we have?
Instead of sharing documents one by one, folders are shared. In fact, sharing the highest level folder is enough. And this folder is shared exclusively to groups.
Each subfolder is shared back to groups with specific permissions.
We can now hang all the documents we want inside the subfolders that will take the permissions of the folder where they are.
This way, we can make sure that when a new user comes, we only have to send him a single link. The one with the highest level folder.
By following this link, you will see all subfolders and all documents (with permission).
If you use calendars, here we have no choice but to send you a link for each of your shared calendars. But, usually, a center doesn’t have too many calendars.
On the centre’s website we have placed the link to this site and when a new teacher arrives, we give him/her an email from our domain name, we put him/her in the corresponding group and explain that he/she enters through the centre’s website to the Desktop. And he finds everything there.