Hi all. I am looking for some clarity on how Google handles access to external Google Sites. The goal is to provide external viewing access to our student OU only when absolutely required, but I'm having some difficulty. Here's what I think I know:
- Google Sites creation/editing access is turned On/Off for our users under Workspace Apps
- Google Sites viewership access is governed by Drive and Docs sharing settings
- Trust Rules, when turned On, override the Drive and Docs sharing settings
We have a Trust Rule for our High School OU that states:
- Scope: High School OU
- Trigger: Sharing and Receiving files
- Conditions : My organization, Allowlisted domains
- Action: Allow
If a High School student browses to any external sites.google.com URL, they receive the (less than helpful) "Google 404. That's an error. The requested URL was not found on this server. That's all we know..." message.
Now we have an external site that is educationally required by one of our courses at https://sites.google.com/marinecorpsjrotc.org/mcjrotcorg/student-resources/le1. My first attempt was to add marinecorpsjrotc.org to our Allowlist. However, I think that method requires them to add us to their domain as well, which is a no-go. So I next added the Condition of External organization = marinecorpsjrotc.org. Again, no luck.
The only way I found to provide access was to create a sub-OU under High School, exclude that sub-OU from the initial rule, and add a new rule scoped to the sub-OU with Condition = Anyone with a Google account. The Site is visible, but that would allow far more access than we would want to give students.
What is best practice for accomplishing external site visibility when needed? Do you simply rely on your content filter to block all sites.google.com URLs except for what you allowlist there? Or am I missing some more elegant method?
If you made it this far, thank you for reading. I would appreciate any insights you all can provide!
Cheers,
Scott
