Transcript

Brandon Carter:

Good afternoon, everybody. Good morning to some of you who are out there on the West Coast or up in the mountains. Good to see everyone. Welcome to today's edition of gPanel Office Hours.

We'll do introductions. We're going to talk about new features and updates. We have one of those to talk about today, but it's fairly significant.

And then Mark is going to take us through the new gPanel Rules Engine, which is something that we've been we've been hinting at for a while. We walked through it briefly in May. It's something that a lot of you have asked for. It's like a, in my head, I think of it as if this, then that for gPanel for your Google Workspace.

Super powerful, lots of cool stuff that you can do that Mark is going to walk you through, and then we'll take your questions toward the end.

As always my name is Brandon. I am your host. I'm the Marketing Director at Promevo. The star of the show is Mark Baquirin, and he is a Customer Engineer on our Google Workspace and Gemini products and really the guru of gPanel. I tried to think of something more exotic than guru.

But yeah, like Mark is a font of gPanel knowledge, and I know that a lot of you that are here have interacted with him before both when he was on the support team as well as in his current role.

Promevo. Who is Promevo? For those of you who are not familiar with us, besides being the creators and maintainers of gPanel, we're a full-service Google Cloud sales, service, and build partner. That's everything from your Google Workspace to your GCP, your ChromeOS devices. We will help you manage, set up. We provide support for all of those products.

And as you see, we have a handful of partners as well that work that we work with, that will help you with everything from AppSheet to training, hardware, migrations, archiving, and backup, all of that stuff.

And of course we're all in on Google's Gemini suite for Workspace and GCP, and a lot of interest in those things right now, and we're working with a ton of clients in that regard.

Related to that, we've got another webinar series that maybe some of you have viewed or signed up for. If not, highly recommend it. We're basically going through the basics that every business needs to know in this modern AI world that we're living in.

We did the first one last month. That's on demand free for you to go to check out.

In that one, we talked about giving your employees access to AI tools. Like what's preferable to having a tool like Gemini where you're managing it and you were providing it versus what we call BYOAI, where people, they have their own free accounts with like ChatGPT or they're using free services. What are the things that you need to know and the risks that are possible security, ethics, things like that? So, that's in the first webinar that's available on demand.

A week from today, we're going to be taking the approach of AI in your services, AI in your products, AI in your internal processes. What does that look like? How do you do that? Should you do that? What are the resources that you need?

So that's coming up. And then in September, we're going to talk about, now that you've got AI in your organization, like how do you make sure that people are using it right? How do you measure it? How do you ensure that they're using it? Because it's not inexpensive, as we're all aware. How do you make sure that AI is doing everything that it can for your business?

And then finally, in October, we're gonna have just a handful of our clients on, not to necessarily talk about Promevo or even Gemini, but just to talk about their experience with onboarding AI, both into their employee productivity tools, as well as in their business, in their services.

So go to promevo.com/webinars, sign up for those. It's a series. If you sign up for one, we'll make sure that you're registered for all of them. And as always, all of our webinars are recorded and provided on demand so you can watch them at your own leisure.

So back to gPanel. What is gPanel? For those of you that aren't familiar or those of you that are exploring it, gPanel is an exclusive Google Workspace management and reporting solution.

Basically, it gives you full control and visibility over pretty much anything that happens within your Google Workspace environment. You can run up to 75 reports, you can create automations for onboarding, offboarding. You can control email signatures and groups.

And a big part of what gPanel can do is what we're getting into today. It's a whole other level of automation, of functionality, that is coming to the platform with the Rules Engine.

But before we totally dive into the Rules Engine, we want to talk about what's new. And this is really for those of you who are, like, gPanel power users. You've probably seen it before. But this is what we are, internally, we call it v2, but it's the next user interface of gPanel, and we have a transition coming up. And I'm just going to hand it over to Mark now, and he's going to take you from this into the workshop for Rules Engine.

But Mark, can you start by just talking about the new UI and what's going to happen in October?

Mark Baquirin:

Yeah, absolutely, Brandon. So when I start off the demo, I will actually start off in v1 and I'll show you, if you haven't switched over yet to v2, I'll show you where to switch over.

If you are currently using gPanel in v1, it's going to look like this. This is our legacy user interface. We will be switching over to our v2, our updated user interface, in October. You can switch over early now to get a taste for it by going over to view settings, and then switching the slider over to v2.

And it should look something like this. And most of the modules are complete. They should be all complete by the time the move happens in October. But this is what we will be using in this demo and going forward.

So what is the Rules Engine? The Rules Engine, as Brandon was saying earlier, is an if this, than that sort of automation. So gPanel already had the ability to create automated workflows, but now we're adding an additional layer so you can trigger workflows by specific triggers that you specify, and we're going to be going over a few of these now.

So first, we'll start off with the triggers. I'll just give you a brief overview, then we'll get into an actual demo here.

So the triggers in the Rules Engine, this is what starts everything off. Currently, we only have two categories of triggers, but we are going to be building this out and we're going to include things like Gmail, group triggers, et cetera. Pretty much anything you can think of.

Currently, these are what we have. We have Drive triggers which are different sorts of Drive events to trigger the automation. So, we'll have document creation, documents deleted, or documents downloaded. And for our admin triggers, we currently have group creation, user creation, user deletion, and user password change.

After the trigger is set, you'll have the option to set up the occurrence. So the occurrence means how many times after the trigger before an action takes place. We'll get into this in just a few minutes. I have a more detailed exercise that we're going to go through the next section is the source.

So, here we're going to be able to specify sources depending on the trigger. If you're using a Drive trigger, you'll have sources including user group, org unit, or domain. You'll have the ability to specify the source to be a Shared Drive, a user's My Drive, or Regex.

And finally the last part would be the actions that we can have the triggers run. We can stack different actions. We're going to be going over a few of these actions in some scenarios that we've we've built out here. Just so you can see how, how these actions work and how the full workflow goes together here.

We're going to be actually using these examples. The first one we'll be using would be detecting and responding to malicious Drive activity. That would be one. The next one is notifying a watch space when excessive admin events occur. And then we'll also be going over fully configuring a new user when they are added to Workspace. And then finally, applying a group template when certain users create groups.

So, let's begin with the first one. So, in this case a rule is triggered when a user deletes a number of documents within a timeframe. The rule can respond by temporarily limiting the user's access.

So this is how you set it up. We're going to head back over to gPanel. You'll find the Rules Engine down in the automation section. It will be the first one highlighted. So you'll already be there. You'll see a list of different rules previously created, and you'll see the dates they're created, the name of the rule, the trigger event the trigger action, the user who created it, and the current status.

And you'll have the ability to click on these three dots and filter each of these columns: ascending, descending, pin them left and right, or create additional filters.

We're going to focus on this first rule. We're going to go ahead and add the rule, and I'll take you step by step how to add this rule.

So in, in this rule, we're going to trigger a rule when a user deletes a number of documents within a time frame. The rule can respond by temporarily limiting the user's access. So, in this case the first thing we have to do is give it a title. So I'm just going to call this detect malicious Drive activity, specifically.

It's nice to put in a description if possible. In this case, just to give us a reminder, I'm going to just copy- paste our description here, but it's very helpful when you're looking back on your on your logs. The description is one of the things that you can filter out. And so filling out that description will only help you in the future when you look back on it.

All right. So our triggers, as I mentioned before, we have admin event triggers and Drive triggers. This specific one will be a Drive trigger, and our Drive trigger will be anytime a document is deleted.

Our next step is to configure the occurrence. A document is deleted within a specific timeframe, your options are whether or not it occur if the trigger happens every single time, and if you uncheck that, you'll unlock the other option. So what this means is this is the threshold.

If documents are deleted three times, then on the fourth occurrence within, we'll specify within, we have minutes, hours, and days. So we'll say if documents have been deleted we'll say, three times within five minutes , it will trigger our action.

On the sources, you can choose, you can stack these up so you can specify a specific user by typing them in here. You can choose a specific user. You might choose this user, click add, and it adds it down here. And then you can also choose a group.

Same with an OU, you can choose an entire OU and you can also specify a domain. So if you wanted it to happen on your primary domain or any secondary domains, if you had secondary domains, they'd be listed down here. You can also do that. And in addition, if you have a Drive action selected, you can specify whether it's going to be targeting a Shared Drive, which would look like this.

Let's see, we have a new hire Shared Drive. We can add that in a user drive. If I was to select a specific user's drive, choose myself.

When I add that in, it's going to ask me which folders. Oh, I have not built folders yet. If I did, you would see the folder structure down here and I can specify a specific folder.

So you can see that these are the the sources that I'm targeting. Now, we can configure the action to take place. So whenever this happens, we're going to temporarily limit the user's action access anytime documents are deleted.

I believe we did three times within five minutes or three documents within five minutes. On the fourth document, we're going to limit their access. We have a few different options right now. And as, as I mentioned earlier, we are going to be expanding this, so you will be seeing more actions, but this is what we have as of today.

In this case, in order to limit their access, I'm going to go ahead and suspend that user, so I'm going to add that in. And in addition, maybe I wanted to send an email, so I'll go ahead and choose send an email and configure that as well. Let's go to the next step, and you can see as I chose that, it adds a send email option.

On our send email action, I can choose who I'd want to send the email to, either a user or a group, and then I can fill in the subject of the email and the body of the email, and if I use this tag drop down, I can actually put in tags from the rule that I'm building. For example, if I chose rule name, It would insert the name of the rule, which I can't remember now what I just named. It's like deletion, detect malicious drive activity, I think.

So if I inserted that, it would print out the rule name for me. What's very handy here we have rule name, rule description. I'd probably want to put that in the body. And also just to show you, you have that same tag feature here so I can put it down the rule description.

It's just a way to tag these things very quickly. So it saves you some time typing the trigger group. And here we have the event specific details. You probably want things like the document ID.

Also, if you didn't want to use the drop down, you can also just use the curly brace and the pipe and then it'll bring it up for you automatically. Then you can choose what you need here and it'll complete it for you.

So that's a really easy way to send a build out an email. And then send it off to perhaps, like, your security team, or your admins, or anyone that you decide in your company that needs to get that email.

Once finished, it's going to send it to my security group. The subject will just be the rule name, and it's going to feature the owner of the of the deleted item. And then, whether or not it's encrypted, and then I could add in whatever special message I want as well, but I'll skip that for now.

We'll hit next, and then at the very end on your review section, it actually gives you a breakdown here, which is very nice. Gives you a little summary of what I just said, what I just configured. When a rule, when a document is deleted three or more times within five minutes by this user, it's going to suspend the user and send an email.

So, I'm going to go ahead and finish that up and it will appear on the list. You can see it's appeared here and it's enabled. But in this case, since I'm just testing, I want to disable that.

So I'm going to go ahead and put a check next to the box and click on this X. This is for disable. This is for delete. If you want to delete the rules, make sure you're clicking the right one. There we go. I've disabled it.

All right, and if you ever want to look into any of these rules to see how they're configured, you can simply click on them. It's going to give you a breakdown of everything, a rule name, rule ID, trigger event, description, creator status, and then the same summary that you saw, and the actions down here and a description of each of the actions that you've configured.

All right, so we're on our second example, we're going to notify a watch space when an excessive admin event occurs. So this is really cool. You can create a watch space and then send a notification to it.

As a breakdown, a rule is triggered when an admin event occurs based within a certain OU or domain and has occurred more than the allowed number of times within a time period.

The rule then notifies the chat space with an alert and temporarily suspends the user. So we're going to go through that exercise.

Let's go ahead and create the rule again. So we're going to go a little faster this time, but if you have any questions here, just let us know. We're going to call this notify chat space for the description. I'm going to just paste in that full description cause it's very handy to see.

All right. In this case, now we're going to be using our admin events trigger group, and our event is going to be a user password change. So if a user password is changed and we're looking for excessive events, so as before, instead of every time a password is changed, we're gonna deselect that, and we'll say if an admin were to change a password on a user five times, within five minutes again. But of course you can see, you could choose days or hours so forth I'll choose my org unit and maybe I'll choose another work unit as well. I'll do the demo users for testing.

If an admin were to change a password multiple times within our time frame, but only on users within these two org units, then we're going to go ahead and send them a chat message. So that's this option right here, send chat message. And here's how you can, here's how you would configure it.

You'll need the space URL. And then as before, you can put down the type of message you want here. But for the space URL, let me jump over to our chats.google.com. So we've created space admin notifications. And for, to get that URL, you'll need to click on the space that you wanted to grab the URL from head up here to the drop down, scroll down to apps and integrations, and you can see I've already got two webhooks here that I could use. I can use either one of these, but here's how to create it. Just hit add webhook, give it a name.

I'm going to say Mark demo, and I can add in a picture if I'd like, but we're going to skip that for now. So let's hit save. And there it is, Mark demo.

So here's the URL that we need to copy. Just click on the three dots and hit copy link. Let's head back over to gPanel. And that's what we would put right in here. So paste that in.

And now you can complete the message as needed. For this example I'll put the rule description. So it'll be a description of the rule, and maybe I'll say, contact the security. So that will be my message in our chat space. So we're going to hit next and review that.

So here's the review again. One more time, I'll take you through this. When a user password has changed five or more times within five minutes within these organizational units, and it lists both of them, the following actions will be taken: send a chat message. I'm going to finish that off and there it is.

Notify chat space, trigger event is user password change, etc. We are going to quickly disable this so we don't have any accidental chats being fired off. Although, in this case it wouldn't matter.

But once again, you can review your rule. And just check out specifically the description. So that's why I say that it's nice to put in your full description there. It just gives you a chance to see in the logs or when you check out the rule details, how it was configured. So that's really for you. And then here's a little bit of the chat message that we have here, or the way I've configured it.

All right, we have got. Two more examples here. The next example will be: fully configure a new user when they are added to Workspace.

So when you're adding a user to Workspace, and you want to make sure they're configured in the way you want them, you may want to use the Rules Engine to do that.

Here's a description. A rule is triggered when a user is added to Workspace based on their OU or domain, a policy can be executed. That configures shares groups and settings. So in this case, what we're going to be triggering for the action will actually be a policy. Let's head back to gPanel, and I'm going to give a brief refresher on policies.

So policies are located in automation, in the same section as the Rules Engine, but just right below policy. So a policy is a it's basically a workflow, an automated workflow that you can configure. In this case, we've configured the shares, groups, and settings workflow already, and we're going to be calling this policy with the Rules Engine rule that we're about to configure. But I just wanted to point out that there it is and just explain again what a policy was.

So we can trigger that with the Rules Engine. Heading back to the Rules Engine, and this is the way we're going to do it. Once again, we're going to create the policy. I'm going to call this configure user and drop in the description.

Alright, and so for this time, it's already set to where it needs to be. This is going to be an admin event on user creation. So anytime a user is created but specifically it's going to be every time a user is created. So we're going to leave that checked. I can choose my entire domain if I wanted to, but in this case, I'll just say any time a user is created just within my test domain.

Any time I create a user in there, it's going to apply a specific policy. And to do that, all I have to do is click on the actions drop down and select run policy. Then I'll have another drop down menu with all of the policies I have divided into new user creation policies or a standard policy.

We're going to go ahead and hit next once we've selected it. And it's going to give us a review. When a user is created within this organization unit, the following actions will be taken. It's going to run a policy. And if I wanted to see more details on which policy it is, once again, I can click on it and it's the action is right down here, run policy. And it gives me the policy name, shares, groups, and settings. So I have a way to look back on it and see which policy I'm running.

For our last example we're going to apply a group template when certain users create groups. This rule is going to be triggered when a group is created based on a certain OU or domain. The rule then applies a group template to ensure the group is private and has the correct settings.

In this case as before, I've already created a policy with the group template, and I'm going to call up that policy. This will be very similar to the last one that we did.

Once again, we're going to start off with adding a rule. We're going to call this, drop in my description.

We're going to leave this on any time it happens. And we are going to select any time it occurs in our entire domain.

Now we specify the action. The action will be very similar to our last one. We're going to be running a policy. I've already pre configured the policy to run or to pre configure the policy. It's going to apply this group template that I'm calling tech one, which is one of our templates.

All right. And so now just to review, when a group is created within this domain, the following actions will be taken running the policy, which I just showed you was the group template called tech one. So we're going to finish that off.

And now we have built out four Rules Engine rules for you in a few different ways. And that is it. If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer any questions that you may have.

Brandon Carter:

This is super helpful. This is a you can get an idea of the possibilities and the functionality here.

Yeah, any questions that any of you all have feel free to drop them into the comments. We've got a few that I definitely want to ask. If you're watching this in the future, or maybe you're just a little bit shy on the webinar right now, you can always send your questions to updates@promevo.com. Those will come directly to me. And I will make sure that they get in front of Mark or someone on our support team so that you can get an answer.

Mark, just thank you for the demo and for walking through it. Super helpful.

First off, my first question is what tiers is this available on or will it be available on ?

Mark Baquirin:

Great question. Sorry, I skipped that portion. There are three tiers of gPanel. There's Starter, Standard, and Enterprise. The Rules Engine will be in the Enterprise version.

Brandon Carter:

Gotcha. Those of you that are here or watching this in the future and you're not on gPanel Enterprise, reach out to us.

We'll give you a full demo and walk you through it and show you the different features and functions that are available with that tier of the platform and see if it's right for you.

Mark, if one of the things real quick, could you delineate just a little bit on the difference between a rule and a policy?

I know you touched on it a little bit, but, can you elaborate on the difference between a rule and a policy?

Mark Baquirin:

Yeah, of course. So we'll start off with policies. And that's something that gPanel has today and something that we've had for a while.

So policy is basically a workflow that you can configure A sequence of actions to be kicked off and automated and scheduled in in, in, in the way that you configure it.

The Rules Engine adds on to that. And it's, it actually really expands on that functionality and that you can now add triggers. Previously with a policy the policy be kicked off when you run the policy. Or if you've scheduled the policy to run at a certain interval, that's when it would run.

But now with the Rules Engine, you control the trigger and the trigger s as you saw today was were certain admin and Drive actions that take place. And those triggers are going to be expanded that we're going to add more triggers as we build this out a little bit more. So it's going to be almost anything you can think of .

Maybe, I'm just speculating now, but for example, a, an email gets sent out that email based on what's in the email will trigger a sequence of security actions and notifications to be sent off.

So that's an example, but as they get built out a little bit more, we're probably going to do more of these webinars just so that we can show what those are.

Brandon Carter:

If we can talk about triggers where, like today, where are triggers available? What. I guess we're talking about a source, like, where what can trigger something today versus what's coming down the pipeline?

Mark Baquirin:

Yeah, let me just go back over to gPanel real quick again.

Behind the scenes, they are testing a lot more triggers, but we currently have Drive triggers and admin triggers.

If you were to select Drive triggers, for example, we'll have these. And depending on the trigger group that you select it's going to change the sources when we get down to trigger sources. The configurations downstream are all contingent on how you configure what is previous to it.

So when I hit drive triggers, when I get to the trigger sources right here, it's gonna give me more trigger sources than if I was to hit admin events. So that's just an example. And then as we start building out more triggers, this sequence of events, it's all gonna change based on what you choose.

Brandon Carter:

You mentioned like an email or a generated, sorry, Gmail generated trigger. Obviously calendar will be probably coming down the line.

Related to actions is there any limit here as to the number of actions that you can stack on? Can I have an email and a, a chat notification and so on and so forth? Or is it like you can create to your heart's content?

Mark Baquirin:

Yeah, they will be somewhat contingent on what's chosen here. For example, if I was to choose user deletion, it's because that's after the user's deleted, no other actions can be taken.

When I head to actions you'll see a smaller list of actions, as opposed to if I was to hit the user creation, I will have all of the actions because when a user is created, I am able to do a lot of these, even though some of them might not make sense here: suspend the user right on creation.

In very, limited cases, you may want to do that. So we've left that in, but things like suspend user, if you were to choose in the beginning user deletion that wouldn't be there that would be pulled out because it wouldn't make sense.

But yes sorry, getting back to your question. If I wanted to stack these, if I was to do a chain, perhaps sign out user and also change password, you will be able to stack them up. You can choose all of them if you want. For example. Great question.

Brandon Carter:

Final question on my end is I noticed when you were setting up the chat notification that you pulled in a webhook. Does this mean that gPanel can be webhooked into any tool or is that specific to like any tool that offers webhooks or is that specific to Google chat right now?

Mark Baquirin:

We, I think we had that in the original version. They've since pulled it out, and I think we're working on it. We're taking a closer look at it. It is always a little bit tricky when you're talking about integrating with third party software that you may or may not know how it's going to react.

So we're taking a close look at that. If we can offer that as one of the, an endpoint that you can call to or something like that. We definitely want to put it in, but we're not going to put it in until it's totally vetted out and totally ready, but you may be seeing that in the future.

Brandon Carter:

Theoretically, Mark, if you have a third party integration as part of a policy, because integrations obviously are part of gPanel Enterprise. Theoretically, that's another way of, let's say we get a lot of requests for Slack notifications that's potentially one area where, if X happens over here, triggers a policy, and one of the Y outputs might be like a Slack notification, for example. Is that kind of a correct assumption?

Mark Baquirin:

Yeah that's the, that's the path that it's going in. But as I said, right now, since we're still taking a closer look at it, I can't speak to it too much, but it would be something very similar to that. Being able to trigger something that would happen in your third party software.

Brandon Carter:

Awesome. Mark, thank you for answering the questions. Once again, anyone that is watching this, you're welcome to reach out to us: updates@promevo.com. Send an email. We'll reply directly to you.

Thank you, Mark. Thanks to everyone who's attending here.

As always, we're constantly right. We're constantly adding new stuff and improvements to gPanel. The best way to stay in touch with that and to stay on top of it is to sign up for a newsletter. You'll get the release notes. You'll get notified whenever something new happens or wherever we publish something. That also includes whenever, like, we have another gPanel webinar, you'll hear about it first.

And as to webinars, we are still working on what the future of gPanel, uh, office hours looks like, but next month we're going to dive into billing. So the ability for you to manipulate users and like the number of users that you have within your Google Workspace using gPanel, we're going to get into that next month.

And then after that, things are going to change a little bit. We are committed to upgrading our knowledge base. So we're going to take some of the time that we steal from Mark for these webinars. We're going to have him and his team go out and build more of these tutorials on in the knowledge base.

Imagine gPanel Office Hours but condensed down into a two or three minute video. We're going to start focusing on producing a lot of that content, which I think will be super helpful for everybody, but we're going to continue to have a live element here.

So beginning in the month of October, we haven't picked a specific date yet, but again, if you're signed up you'll hear about it as soon as we get things finalized. We're going to move into more of a shorter condensed version of office hours. That's more focused on what's new. And we're going to look at maybe expanding those types of webinars out, like a new user onboarding, for example. So October, November, December.

So look for announcements around that, but just know we're constantly shipping things and we're constantly trying to create a better experience and better documentation and tutorials for those. So keep an eye out.

Please, reach out to me directly, reach out to Mark, always happy to talk through these things but that being said, Mark, thank you. Much appreciated. I know you've been in a ton of work to this.

Thank you to the gPanel team in general for, adding all these cool functions to it.

And thanks to everyone for attending, those of you that are here live. We really appreciate it. Couldn't do it without you. And to those that, those of you that are in the future thank you.

If you're not on gPanel right now, then go to promevo.com and sign up for gPanel today. And we'll get you started with some cool stuff like our Rules Engine.

And with that, happy Tuesday, everyone.

And have a great day. Bye now.

Mark Baquirin:

Thanks everyone.