Main Nav

Posted by listserv-anon on March 27, 2012
Message from breslinj@rosemontschool.org

Friends,  Any help that you might provide to our wonderful young tech specialist would be most appreciated. See his issue below. Thanks.   Jim

Hi,

I'm Eric Wunder, Rosemont School of the Holy Child's new(ish) sysadmin/tech support specialist. I was encouraged to write by Jim Breslin.

We've recently made the migration to Google Apps for our email, and now I'm working on setting up mailing lists, where I've run into a bit of a snag. When creating Groups for our Faculty and Staff, we discovered that although students are not able to see Groups in the Directory, they able to see that the Groups exist via GMail's autocomplete in the To line.

For lists like Faculty and Staff, it is not as important, but when we get to lists for the Trustees and Board of Directors, we definitely do not want Students, Faculty, or Staff to know that those lists exist. However, we still need Faculty to be able to send emails to Staff, and vice-versa. A better example might be a member of the Board needing to send an email to a Board committee without being a member of that committee.

As I have it now, anyone with @rosemontschool.org can send to Faculty and Staff, but only the Owner can see the users in the group. Students are still able to see the faculty list when they start typing Faculty into the To line.

Please let me know if there's something I'm missing, or if there's a better way to do this.

If you prefer give me a call.

Thanks,
Eric Wunder
Rosemont School of the Holy Child
1344 Montgomery Ave
Rosemont, PA 19087
610-922-1000 (x1220)

--
James E. Breslin                                                        
Director of Technology
Rosemont School of the Holy Child
1344 Montgomery Avenue
Rosemont, PA   19010
610-922-1004 (direct)
610-922-1030 (fax)

********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.

Comments

Message from shawt@d-e.org

Is the issue that you don't want people to know that you have a BOT list, or that you don't want people to be able to easily send to that list.

You can set the groups so that posting to the group is only permitted by group members, but of course that doesn't get around your BOT committee problem. An alternative would be to require group moderation if you have a trusted person (perhaps the Head's admin assistant) who was willing to screen out any inappropriate messages sent to the group. Messages would go first to your moderator who could elect to let them go through or not.

Hope this helps.
Trevor

Posted by: listserv-anon on March 27, 2012
Message from schmelderm@lancastercountryday.org

I agree with Trevor. It's impossible to hide the fact that the list exists, but I'm not sure of the harm of that, as long as you restrict who can email to it and more importantly, who can see the members. 

Alternatively, if you really want to keep them guessing, give it an obscure name or abbreviation.


Mike Schmelder
Director of Information Services

Lancaster Country Day School
725 Hamilton Road
Lancaster, PA  17603-2491

717.392.2916 x246

www.lancastercountryday.org

  




Posted by: listserv-anon on March 27, 2012
I'm not going to say for sure that this is your answer, but it's probably worth checking.  In the Google Apps dashboard, go to Settings then select service Google Groups for Business. Under Group visibility, there is an option that says group owners can hide groups from the groups directory.  My assumption is if you have then enabled, which I do not think is the default, then you can configure the individual group to now show up in the directions.  Again guessing here, but if it does not show up in the directory, then I'm thinking it won't show up as an auto fill entry in the address book.

Note, when you try to test this, note that if you entered it previously will may still show up for the person whose entered it in the past as it may now be listed as a contact for that individual.  Once something is listed as a contact, which Google will add automatically in some cases, it will always show up in the to window (even if an email address is no longer valid).  You need to go into the contacts for that person and delete that contact before doing your test, or test it from an account of someone who has never tried to type the list address before.

However, I don't really think you can depend on obscurity as security even if you do get it out of the address book.  As mentioned previously, if you need the list to be usable by anyone but want it moderated then you need to moderate it.  Otherwise, you can set the list to only receive messages from list members. 

If you were dealing with a somewhat small amount of people and can get them all in a room together, which doesn't sound like the case for a board committee, then another option would be to subscdribe the entire board to the list but set it to only email messages to those on the committee.  Other board members could see all the messages if they logged into the web interface, could send email to the list since they are list members, but they would not receive the messages sent to the committee as an email.

Regards,
Bill
--
Bill Campbell
Academic Technology Coordinator  |  Dwight-Englewood School
www.d-e.org
+1 201-569-9500 x3827  |  campbb@d-e.org
Twitter: BillCamp  |  Google+: bit.ly/BillAtGplus



Posted by: campbb on March 27, 2012
Message from schmelderm@lancastercountryday.org

Hi Bill,

I tried that setting "do not show in directory" and tested from an account that had never sent to the group. Unfortunately, it showed up in autocomplete even though it's not in the directory.

Mike

On Mar 27, 2012, at 3:19 PM, Bill Campbell <campbb@d-e.org> wrote:

I'm not going to say for sure that this is your answer, but it's probably worth checking.  In the Google Apps dashboard, go to Settings then select service Google Groups for Business. Under Group visibility, there is an option that says group owners can hide groups from the groups directory.  My assumption is if you have then enabled, which I do not think is the default, then you can configure the individual group to now show up in the directions.  Again guessing here, but if it does not show up in the directory, then I'm thinking it won't show up as an auto fill entry in the address book.

Note, when you try to test this, note that if you entered it previously will may still show up for the person whose entered it in the past as it may now be listed as a contact for that individual.  Once something is listed as a contact, which Google will add automatically in some cases, it will always show up in the to window (even if an email address is no longer valid).  You need to go into the contacts for that person and delete that contact before doing your test, or test it from an account of someone who has never tried to type the list address before.

However, I don't really think you can depend on obscurity as security even if you do get it out of the address book.  As mentioned previously, if you need the list to be usable by anyone but want it moderated then you need to moderate it.  Otherwise, you can set the list to only receive messages from list members. 

If you were dealing with a somewhat small amount of people and can get them all in a room together, which doesn't sound like the case for a board committee, then another option would be to subscdribe the entire board to the list but set it to only email messages to those on the committee.  Other board members could see all the messages if they logged into the web interface, could send email to the list since they are list members, but they would not receive the messages sent to the committee as an email.

Regards,
Bill
--
Bill Campbell
Academic Technology Coordinator  |  Dwight-Englewood School
www.d-e.org
+1 201-569-9500 x3827  |  campbb@d-e.org
Twitter: BillCamp  |  Google+: bit.ly/BillAtGplus



Posted by: listserv-anon on March 27, 2012
Message from tphelan@peddie.org

I've been following this thread and don't have anything to offer in way of a solution, but for those interested in the sordid history of email groups in Google Apps I have the following to offer...

I started following Google Apps from almost the day it was launched as "Google for Your Domain" (2006?) and mail groups have to win the prize for the feature with the most dead ends abrupt changes...and this is saying A LOT for a Google product as Google seems to pride itself on keeping customers off balance by making abrupt changes.

Email groups started life as "Mail Lists" and could be included in the domain directory (and hence enable domain-wide type ahead) provided your domain didn't have over 500 (or was it 1000?) users. Mail lists went through a number of changes and then came the radical shift to Google Groups which essentially turned every mail list into a full fledged Google Group. The API actually contains different classes  for handling "mail lists" and "groups" although they both now seem to reference the same core data objects.

Anyhow, when Groups first started they were NOT published to the domain directory and thus inability to have domain-wide type ahead for domain groups was a very common and significant complaint. Google's answer at the time was that we should create a "Shared Contact" for each Google group we wanted published in the domain directory. A shared contact is simply a contact published to the domain directory which references any email address, including those outside of the domain which was its main purpose I think. The only problem was that the only way to do manage shared contacts was with a 3rd party tool or the API. The Shared Contacts page on my GoogleAppsAdmin site (https://webapps.peddie.org/GoogleAppsAdmin/) was thus born. This actually turned out to be a very good way of handling groups IMHO as it gave complete control over if and how domain groups were published to the domain directory. I found prefacing all of our shared contacts for published groups with a "#" was very helpful because users could then simply type "#" and see a list of all available domain groups. Shared contacts can still be used in this way which is why I have left the Shared Contact page on my site. [side note: It is very easy to add a domain to my site so if anyone reading this is curious feel free to just send me your Google Apps domain and I'll add your domain to the authorized list.]

But of course Google couldn't leave well enough alone. Sometime about a year or so ago ALL of our groups started appearing in type ahead lists, even ones we didn't want to publish and for which didn't have a shared contact. After looking into it, we found out that, sure enough, Google made a significant change without bothering to notify us. Now all groups are published to the domain directory and as far as I know there is nothing you can do about it.

Lastly, I hope to set aside a few days this summer to take a fresh look at the GoogleAppsAdmin site to see if there is anything worth updating. One thing on my list is to see if there is anything in the API that would allow us to unpublish a group, but I'm not hopeful.

And this concludes all the useless knowledge I have about Google email groups.

Tom

-- 
Tom Phelan
Director of Technology
Peddie School
tphelan@peddie.org
Office: 609-944-7625
http://www.peddie.org



Posted by: listserv-anon on March 28, 2012
Message from breslinj@rosemontschool.org

Thank you all for your responses. We think we are now doing the best we can with what Google has given. 

In order to give access to the mailing lists to the people that need to send email, but are not meant to be on the receiving end of the list, we will be including everyone as members of the list, but specifying who will (or will not) receive email when we add them as members. We will also be turning off online archiving for any sensitive mailing lists, like the Board of Directors. That way a select group of individuals will be able to send email to the Board without being included on every mailing and without being able to access it on the Groups page, similar to a whitelist.

Initially, we failed to see the option to add Google Groups for Business to our services, so we were previously working with the standard Google Apps' Groups, which has even less configuration than the Google Groups for Business.

Thank you again for the time and effort many of you put in to helping us understand Google Groups better.

Regards,

Eric Wunder
Rosemont School of the Holy Child
1344 Montgomery Ave
Rosemont, PA 19010
610-922-1000 (x1220)


Posted by: listserv-anon on April 3, 2012
Post a Comment

Research and Publications

Conferences and Events

Career Development

Focus Areas and Initiatives

Connect and Contribute

About EDUCAUSE

Close

 


Current Issue
March/April 2013
EDUCAUSE Review

Publications

Research

Close


Annual Conference
October 15–18, 2013
Save the date!

Events for all Levels and Interests

Whether you're looking for a conference to attend face-to-face to connect with peers, or for an online event for team professional development, see what's upcoming.

See All Events

Close

EDUCAUSE Institute
Leadership/Management Programs
Explore More

Career Center

Find or Post a Job

Leadership and Management Programs

EDUCAUSE Institute
Advanced Programs
Project Management

 

Fellowships and Awards

Fellowships
Awards Programs

Getting Involved

Mentoring
Volunteer
Speak at an Event

 

 

Jump Start Your Career Growth

Explore EDUCAUSE professional development opportunities that match your career aspirations and desired level of time investment through our interactive online guide.

Advance Your Career

 

Close

Latest Topics

EDUCAUSE organizes its efforts around three IT Focus Areas

 

Enterprise and Infrastructure

Enterprise and
Infrastructure

Policy and Security

Policy and
Security

Teaching and Learning

Teaching and
Learning

 

Join These Programs If Your Focus Is

Close

From the Blogs
The Role of Campus Leadership in Ensuring IT Accessibility
by
Diana Oblinger

Find Others

Share Ideas

Get on the Higher Ed IT Map

Employees of EDUCAUSE member institutions and organizations are invited to create individual profiles.
 

Create Your Profile

 

Close

2013 Strategic Priorities

  • Connected Learning
  • Enterprise IT
  • Foundations


Learn More >

Uncommon Thinking for the Common Good™

EDUCAUSE is the foremost community of higher education IT leaders and professionals.
 

Discover Membership