Groups - hold my hand and explain to me, please...

[Justin_W]

I feel like I've seen this posted previously ( heck, maybe even by me years ago), but it's come back up again and I'm looking for help.

Google Groups.

I'm not sure why it seems as convoluted and clunky as it does.

For all intents and purposes, we're really just talking about "distribution lists" - aka email lists.

We've got groups for each department - and of course we've got groups for each grade level.

I'm trying to sort out the logic to making it so I can have these groups available (in others word, people can email them) to only certain other people/groups - without having to individually add each person/group to them.

1. Example: KitchenGroup.  
2. Members are all staff who work in the kitchen
3. Owner is an IT account that sets permissions

I need every other staff member to be able to email this group (directly, or by nested groups).

I believe the relevant setting is "who can post". And the options there are: "Group Owners","Group Managers" ,Group Members", "Entire Organization", and "External".

Owners doesn't make sense here, Managers doesn't make sense.  External doesn't make sense - so we rule all those out.

That leaves "Group Members" or "Entire Organization".

Well, "group members" doesn't work, because all other staff that may email this group aren't in this group themselves.  No would we want them to be, because the emails sent there aren't intended for non-Kitchen staff.

So that leaves - "Entire Organization" - and now I've got a situation where a student can send an email to all kitchen staff - or really, all staff, all other students, etc.  And that's far from ideal too.

It seems like it's missing a very important option to exclude Students or specific OUs/Group.

I'm certain I'm missing something and this really is much easier than it's appearing to me right now.  

I realize "groups" are a bit more than just "email distribution lists" in the world of Google - and that's great. We use them for sharing and other things too.  But the same issue applies.

Looking through the documentation didn't clear it up for me.  Groups and "Groups for Business" only complicates things.

The whole terminology seems archaic - like it's some sort of BBS setup. "Posting", "View conversations" "Moderate Messages" etc.  Does anyone really use it that way? Use the web interface?

It makes it seem like I need a decoder ring to translate it into how I imagine the vast majority of schools/businesses actually use it - for email lists and sharing permissions.   And that's weird to me because it doesn't seem like the kind of thing that needs be that complicated. 

[ddelboccio]

You can't exclude students here.  You need to make a Gmail compliance rule.  I did this for my student grade level email groups.  

You need to create a new compliance rule, ON THE OU your students are in, that (Step1) affects outbound and internal sending, then make an expression (step 2) with the location set to "recipient header" which equals the email address of the group in question.  In my case, it is "students5th@district31.net".  Then on step three, choose REJECT MESSAGE.

[icrew]

Yeah, who can send to groups has been a pain point for a while now. And Google has underinvested in Groups for many, many years. 

I wrote up a document for our community quite a while back, at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DfTbCOml3mv2CM4NoaKUyBr3tx8P8tHxPv6nhssYxYU/edit#heading=h.6mrae... that explains some of it. It's a bit outdated, but the concepts might be helpful. One small translation that'll be helpful: "CalGroups" is UC Berkeley-speak for our instance of InCommon Grouper.

Hope that helps,

Ian

[James_Seymour]

At the end of the day, if a student emails a staff group, you know who sent the email. And then this becomes a 'teaching & learning' optortuing for the students. Others may class this as a 'Classroom management' issue, and not needing a technical solution.

However if you have groups of students, that are not populated by sub-groups, then you could add them to the staff groups and set them to not receive emails and not allowed to post.

[Kim_Nilsson]

Content Compliance (or Routing) is what I use, and recommend when I train admins.

It gives the admin the most power over who can send to groups, including allowing users from external domains. It also doesn't have any of the potentially negative effects connected with adding the Allowed Senders to the group either directly or indirectly (as members of a subgroup).

[BrandonB]

+1 to @James_Seymour I created rules to block all users from email our BIG lists (all staff, all certified staff, etc). In those groups, only managers (small amount of organizational leaders) can post. I did not worry about the hundreds of other email groups we have. If a student emails the principals group (or any other group), their identity is clear, as is the 'teachable moment'.