G Suite for Education: Deployment Guide
This information will help domain administrators in charge of moving their student and/or faculty/staff populations to G Suite for Education.This material is targeted towards IT administrators (or others) inclined to know more about the technical aspects of a G Suite deployment.
This information will help domain administrators in charge of moving their student and/or faculty/staff populations to G Suite for Education.This material is targeted towards IT administrators (or others) inclined to know more about the technical aspects of a G Suite deployment.
G Suite for Education Privacy Notice
Before sign up or creating a G suite Education we must review the G Suite for Education Privacy Notice for information on how Google collects and uses information from G Suite for Education accounts specifically.
1. Domain Set-Up
There are many ways to setup your domains. Here are the more common setups we’ve seen. Please before making a decision,
A. Managing one domain/G Suite instance (Best option)
Register mydistrict.edu (example domain name) and provision teacher, staff, as well as student accounts within this G Suite account.
B. Manage multiple domains in single G Suite instance (Recommended)
Register your production domain in G Suite. For example, register your primary domain.
Register mydistrict.edu for your teachers and staff and students.mydistrict.edu for your students only, as two separate G Suite instances. You’ll manage these using two separate control panels. individual G Suite instance. If you’d like to add contact information of users outside of the G Suite instance, you’ll need to create contact objects using the Shared Contacts API, G Suite Directory Sync or a marketplace tool.
2. Sign Up for G Suite /Education
Once you decide on the domain name(s) that’ll be associated with your production G Suite instance(s), we will sign up. If verification sounds a little too technical for you, don’t worry, you now have access to 1:1, step-by-step domain verification support with the help of a Google Support specialist completely free of charge.
To get in touch, follow these instructions.
3. Decide on your organizational structure
Organizational units allow you to segregate your user population (i.e. you can create an organization for students and another for faculty - you can further break down the student organization by grade).You can configure email delivery settings so that some users can only email users within the domain (and receive emails from users within the domain).
4. Mail Architecture
Will you change your MX to point to Google? You’ll want to consider your current mail architecture/flow and think about the best way to adjust moving forward so that mail can be delivered to users within G Suite.
Dual Delivery through Legacy Server
In this scenario, MX records will not change - they’ll continue to point to the legacy server. On your G Suite Edu domain, you will need to set up a domain alias (for example, g.school.edu) with MX records pointing to G Suite. It will then forward from your legacy server to the domain alias that you’ve set up.
Dual Delivery through Google
In this scenario, MX records will point to Google. You’ll then set up email routing in the G Suite Edu control panel to send mail back to your legacy server for all accounts.
Split delivery through G Suite
In this scenario, MX records will point to Google. You will then need to set up email routing in G Suite Edu control panel to send mail back to the legacy server for accounts that are not found in Google.
5. Provisioning
User can be created and you’ll want to choose the one that works best for your institution. You can check the best practices document to see what is the best option for you.
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CSV Upload
CSV uploads can be done upload up to 500 users at a time. If you choose a CSV upload, the format can be found here Cell A1: Email Address, Cell B1: First Name, Cell C1: Last Name, Cell D1: Password
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G Suite Directory Sync
G Suite Directory Sync allows you to automatically provision users, groups, and contacts based on the user data in your LDAP server, such as Microsoft Active Directory. G Suite Directory Sync connects to your G Suite directory and adds/deletes user accounts to match your existing organizational schema. The G Suite Directory Sync configuration wizard guides you through customizing your synchronization and mapping of your LDAP user list to your G Suite users, nicknames, shared contacts, and groups. To manage your synchronization, you can perform test synchronizations, and configure change limits, notifications, and scheduled synchronizations.
6. Google Classroom Setup
Will you create Google Classroom classes automatically or will you have teachers create their own classes?
Teachers creating their own classes
To create a class, a teacher can follow the steps mentioned here.
Classroom API
Google has launched the Classroom API which allows developers to automatically create and populate classes. This tusk can all be done by the Gsuite Administrator with no interaction from students or teachers. Developers will want to review the following:
3rd Party Options
With the feature of new Classroom API, 3rd party developers, can easily integrate with Google Classroom to create and populate classes. Some great examples of this are:
7. Authentication
Will G suite Edu users be authenticating straight to Google (using the default Google login page)? Or you're looking for integrating login with other services that you have at your school?
If your users have passwords stored in Google, then you will need to either sync passwords from an existing campus system or create new passwords for users in Apps. If you are looking to sync passwords from Active Directory, you can take a look at the following:
Its recommended to enter the Admin or Help desk contact information for end-user password recovery, so users can contact the right team in case of any login issues, it only takes 1minute!
If Admin is interested in integrating logins with other services at your institution, you should take a look at Single Sign-On articles/resources. NOTE: Single Sign-On works for browser-based interactions. If your users will be interacting with G Suite via mail clients or mobile devices, they will need a password stored in G Suite.
8. Data Migration
Data migrations can be done by server-side or client The data that can be migrated from your legacy server will depend on the legacy server you’re looking to migrate from.
No migration
Pros: Reducing the overall time/complexity of deployment as there is no need for IT admins to migrate data.
Cons: Users want some of their old account data and may not know how to keep it.
Client-side
Pros: Reducing the overall time/complexity of deployment as there is no need for IT admins to migrate data.
Cons: Help Desk/IT admin team may be contacted by users for help, since users run these migrations on their own.
Inside one can find a step-by-step outline for completing the technical aspects of your deployment, including relevant help center articles.
