Transcript
Brandon Carter:
Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in to this edition of gPanel® Office Hours. My name is Brandon Carter. I'm the Marketing Director at Promevo, and I'll be your host today. I'm joined by Mark Baquirin, who is one of our support specialists and an absolute gPanel guru. This is the second edition of our gPanel® Office Hour series.
The purpose here is to present a tutorial on one specific function or set of functions every month. Last month, we covered the basics of gPanel® and you can find that recording using the link on this page, but there's always a lot of improvements and new functions being added to gPanel®. So, moving forward, we're going to change the format a little.
We're going to spend a few minutes at the beginning of every webinar to cover any new features and functions that have been added to gPanel® in the previous couple of weeks. If you're on our gPanel® mailing list, then you may have already received the release notes for these features, but we want to show them to you live and walk through and give you the chance to ask questions about them.
And, of course, we'll end every session by going through your questions, but the main point here is to pick out at least 1 topic that we're going to walk through and show you a deep dive tutorial. And here's something that you can do within gPanel®. That you can then take and replicate within your own platform.
If you don't know Promevo, we're a Google Cloud Premier Partner who serves all of the businesses Google needs, from Chrome to cloud. We can manage and provide one to one support for all your Google products, including Chromebooks, Google Workspace, Google Cloud Platform, Looker, Maps, Voice, and so much more. All the Google stuff.
If you're only working with gPanel®, then you're only seeing a tiny fraction of how we can help. Speaking of gPanel®, we noticed a surprising amount of folks on last month's webinar were exploring the platform and not yet full users or clients.
So what is gPanel®? Well, it's our proprietary Google Workspace user management and reporting platform.
What does it do? It takes the functions you can find in Google Admin console and adds in a much deeper level of granularity, way more reports, automation, API integration. So you can connect your workspace to things like your HRIS system, your SSO platform, even your CRM. Besides efficiency and workspace omniscience, it helps you protect your company from security risks like email phishing scams. Unauthorized sharing of sensitive documents, visibility in the shared drive, things like that.
If you find yourself watching this and are not yet a gPanel® user, sign up for a free trial today or reach out and an expert like Mark will give you a personally guided tour. Speaking of Mark, let's talk about what's new.
Brandon Carter:
Mark, do you want to speak on these new features for a second?
Mark Baquirin:
Thank you, Brandon. Yes. The new features that we have in gPanel® are both located in the decommissioning tool in the document section. The first action is called "remove external shares." And the reason that you would be using this is during your offboarding process, you may want to remove any shares that are shared to any external parties as a way of securing your data.
The second action is called "remove shared drives." And what this does is it gives you the ability to remove the target user from any shared drives in your organization.
Brandon Carter:
Okay, those sound interesting. Mark, let's, let's get into some tutorials here. Um, one of the major benefits of gPanel® is being able to manage certain functions across large groups of people, or even an entire organization. Mark is going to walk you through some of the most common bulk operations people use in gPanel®.
Mark Baquirin:
Okay. So for our demo today, we're going to be going over three bulk operations and they are user profile, force password reset, and multiple user vacation responder. These three bulk operations are located in your gPanel® under tools, bulk operations.
I'll take you over to the creation and show you how they're a little bit different from each other.
We're going to go ahead and create the first one, which is user profile. Click on the add (+) icon in the upper right, the plus sign. You would need to name your operation first, and then from the list, scroll all the way to the bottom and choose user profile. It gives you a description here. The user operation allows you to make user profile changes to many users at once. Click next, and you have a choice of Guide Me or Advanced. We're going to use Guide Me, but if you had a sheet already made, you could choose advanced hit next.
And you can select that sheet by hitting select file. We're going to go back to Guide Me in order to create the sheet. Go ahead and select Guide Me and click next. This page shows the available columns and you have the ability to select which column you wanted to add to the sheet. You can click these plus buttons when you hover over, or you can check which ones you want and then click add selected.
For our demonstration, I'm going to add every column that you're able to modify. Click next.
On this page, you can select your source. You can either select a user or several users by clicking the user icon, or groups, organizational units, and that's it. In the user section, click browse and you'll have the ability to see and select the users you want to add.
Another way to do it Is to click this check box. If you want to add every user, when you go to groups, it's similar clicking browse, you have the ability to add which groups you you'd like by selecting them. And organizational units, it is similar. You can click organizational unit button, browse, and then selected the OU you want to target. In this case, I'm going to. Select my own user and a few others.
We'll select some random users. Once you've made your selection, click next. On this page, you have the chance to review the columns that you've added into the report and the opportunity to send an email notification upon completion. Next, you would submit the report. For the user profile report and several other reports, it's a two step bulk operation.
The first step is to generate a report. Once you've submitted, The first step, a pop up will appear and when you click here it will launch the report that you just generated. You can see that it's, it's complete. It's important to wait until the report is complete. The larger the scope of your report, the longer it will take.
You should wait until you see complete on one of the last rows and that's when you know that the report is finished. After it's finished, you can change any of the column cells that you'd like.
Here's a preview again. As you can see, there are quite a few areas that you can change different attributes, including custom attributes. In this case, I'm going to change my last name. We'll just put the next step is to go back to gPanel®. You can close this window. If it's still open, refresh this section and search for the report that you just made in this case, I titled it MB profile.
When you hover over it, you'll see three dots that you can click on and you have three options. You can view the report, refresh the spreadsheet, or run it. I'm going to view the spreadsheet, just to show you. It will launch again, and you can see that my modification remains. So this is a way that you can verify that your modifications have been properly uploaded.
Your next option is to refresh the spreadsheet, which I'll do now. After refreshing the spreadsheet, I'm going to refresh this section of gPanel®. I will locate my report again, MB Profile in this case. Now, when I click view spreadsheet, it's actually going to rerun my report and you can see that my modifications have been reverted.
Now, I'm going to demonstrate actually making a modification. I'm going to change my last name and this person's last name and I will now go back to gPanel®. If I'd like to, I can view the sheet just to verify that the modifications have been saved, and they have. I'm going to refresh this, and this time I'm going to run it.
I'm taken to a preview page where I can see a small preview of some of the changes I've made here.
When I'm happy with it, I can hit run operation. Please read and accept this. There's a pop up saying that the operation is running. We can close this, but it's important to wait until you see a notification in the upper right next to your picture. When the notification appears in the upper right, click on it to view how many users were updated and if there were any errors.
In this case, everyone was updated and there were no errors. To double check, I'm going to search for my own user.
Okay, now you can see from my user page, my last name has been updated. And that's how you do a bulk operation for a user profile. The next thing I'd like to demonstrate is the bulk operation for the force password reset. It's located in Tools, Bulk Operations. We're going to name our, our operation, and we're going to choose Force password reset.
The force password reset operation allows you to force a select group of users to reset their account passwords. Click next. Now you can select your user as before.
Click next. And with this bulk operation, there is no further configuration. As soon as you hit submit, it will reset the target user or users. You will be notified when it's complete, and you will see the notification in the upper right. And the last bulk operation that we are going over today is called the Multiple User Vacation Responder.
Once again, it's located in Tools, Bulk Operations, and to create it, just click the plus icon in the upper right. Name the operation, and select Multiple User Vacation Responder. And the Multiple User Vacation Responder operation allows you to add a vacation responder to one or more users.
In this case, I'm going to add this to myself, but once again, you can add it to multiple users if necessary. Click next. Here, you can enable or disable the responder upon saving. You can choose the first day that the responder will be turned on and when it will be turned off. Insert a subject, insert a message, and you are ready to go.
Click next. Oops, I chose the wrong month. All right. Click next, and you can send a notification if you would like, submit, and you will be notified when it's complete. On the target date, you can verify that the responder has been turned on by going to your user, going to Gmail, vacation responder, and you will see it here just as we've configured it. Okay, and that's it for the bulk operations.
Brandon Carter:
Okay, now normally this is where we would take questions from the audience, but of course, This is prerecorded. So if you're watching this and you have questions, you have several options.
One, if you get this in your email, you can reply to that email. Pretty much any email that you get from Promevo, you can reply to. We'll see it. Most of them come directly to my inbox, so I'll make sure that your question is answered promptly. You can also reach out to your account manager if you're an existing gPanel® client, And they'll be happy to respond to you.
And then the third option for any of you watching this in the future, just send an email to updates at Promevo.com. Whatever your question is, we will see it. We'll answer it. We'll get back to you as soon as we can. Now, we did have some people submit some questions ahead of time that I wanted to toss at Mark.
So let's talk about those. First up. When will gPanel® have the ability to add recovery information to user accounts, Mark?
Mark Baquirin:
gPanel® will have the ability to add recovery information sometime in 2024.
Brandon Carter:
Good to know. Next question. We need to run a bulk operation to make an email alias as the default send as for all users in our org. Is something like that possible?
Mark Baquirin:
Something like that may be possible. We are currently looking into it and if we can do it, we certainly will. Um, but again, that would be scheduled for sometime in 2024.
Brandon Carter:
Excellent. Thank you. Okay. Another one. Is there a report to Query Drive for files that have not been accessed for a certain period of time?
Brandon Carter:
For example, all files that have not been accessed since January 1st, 2021?
Mark Baquirin:
Absolutely. I'm going to switch back over to gPanel® and show you where it's located. Okay, so back in gPanel, there are two reports in the reporting section that you can use.
They are docs modified in last 14 days, and docs modified in the last X number of days if you were to choose the second one, you can choose to run the report and you could choose to run it on a schedule. If you'd like this section, choose the number of days back. You'd like. I'll choose 180 for 6 months.
The destination folder is optional, but it gives you a chance to automatically. Place it in a destination folder upon generating the report. We're going to skip it for now. In the select columns area, you have the ability to, um, select individual columns or add every, every column.
In your source selection, you can configure the scope of your report user level, group, your organization, or your entire domain. The larger your report, the longer it will take to run. So I'll run it on one user. You have the option to send an email notification if you'd like you have the option to share this Google Sheet to another person upon creating it.
And here, since we chose schedule at the very beginning, we have the option to run this on a schedule. In this case, I'll choose every Monday at 8 AM. The last section gives you a chance to review your configuration, to retain the report name or not, and to run the report immediately after saving.
Once you submit, the report will start running, a pop up will appear, and it will give you the chance to run the report by clicking here. And there it is. The report is complete when the last line says completed.
Brandon Carter:
Very cool. Seems like this is something that would be helpful for, like, if you need to free up drive space. You're starting to come up against your your maximum. This would be a good way to identify some files that you can get rid of.
Mark Baquirin:
That's right. Absolutely.
Brandon Carter:
Hey, while you, if you want to go ahead and share your screen again, let's go ahead and talk about this last one that I think is probably a big topic that we could probably spend an entire Office Hours webinar on. But if you can touch on it very quickly, does gPanel® have role permissions?
Mark Baquirin:
It absolutely does. Role permissions are found under Administration, Role Manager. As you can see, we have many because we've created multiple custom roles. You start off with two roles, two main roles, the admin role and the user role, which in this case is now on our second page because we've created so many.
You can always tell that these are the default roles because here in the description, it will tell you this is the user role. Any user not explicitly assigned to a role will have this role. It cannot be deleted, and you'll see the same description for the admin role. So these are your root roles that can be assigned or built out to a custom role.
For example, if I were to click on the three dots after hovering over it, I can edit the role. I can assign the role by going to members.
It will give me a list of members already assigned to the role, and I have the ability to add or remove any member I'd like to the role. That is the same as the user role. If we head back, you have the ability to create custom admin and user roles. From the main section by clicking on the plus sign in the upper right, you must first name the role and choose whether or not you're customizing an admin role or making a custom user role, and you have the option to add a description.
If you'd like, we're going to save that after you save it. You'll be taken directly into the details and the first. Section is details. You can add in your description if you'd like. The second section is probably one of the more important sections is the permission section, and here you have the permission to select or deselect any admin action that you can do in gPanel®.
And as you can see, there are over, I believe. over a few hundred actions that you can do. Why this is important is because you may want to provide a restricted admin type role to one of your team members. You may also want to provide a restricted user type role to some of your users. Here you will have the option to do just that.
You can go through and add and remove different actions as necessary. After you've selected your permissions. You can assign the members as we spoke about before. You can view further settings, and these are things that we will. Expand upon in the future because they are, they contain a little too much information for this video.
Brandon Carter:
Yeah, this looks like something that we definitely want to devote perhaps an entire session of deep panel office hours to in the near future. Important, like something that we need to spend some like good time on and really show people how to do. Anything else that you want to cover on that one, Mark?
Mark Baquirin:
Well, there is a lot to cover, but I think we'll save it for a future video.
Brandon Carter:
Agreed. Okay, I will go ahead and share my screen back out. Okay, that's it for questions. Thank you, Mark. Remember to send your bulk operations questions over or any questions for that matter. Anything you want to know about gPanel, Promevo, we're happy to help. We just need to hear about it. Like come and tell us and ask us.
If you want a feature, we will try to build it for you. We'll get onto the roadmap. You just need to let us know.
Mark, thanks for all that great info and the detailed walkthrough. Sincerely, we appreciate your help.
Mark Baquirin:
Always happy to help. And thank you so much.
Brandon Carter:
And a reminder to everyone to be sure that you join our gPanel mailing list. You'll be the first to know when new features are added. And when new sessions of office hours are scheduled, so go to https://promevo.com/gpanel-newsletter to sign up for those updates. Our next session of gPanel office hours will be in 2024. We'll hope you'll join us live, fingers crossed, live on January 16 for a deep dive on policies.
Until then, we want everyone to have happy holidays and a wonderful new year. Stay warm and we will see you in January.
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