Workspace Admins deadline Oct 23rd to confirm 3rd Party Apps to avoid student access disruption

[Kristal]

Hi,

I was asked to share the following information in the Admin Hub about the upcoming deadline (global).

Edu Admins are required to review and confirm their access settings for third-party apps that are currently accessible to their users by Oct 23, 2023. There is a step by step guided experience in Admin Console to review and confirm settings. If needed, you’ll be able to make changes to access settings before confirming. As a reminder, schools are responsible for obtaining parental consent for use of these apps where required. Learn more

After Oct 23, 2023:

• Any apps in the guided experience in Admin Console that are not confirmed by Oct 23, 2023 will be inaccessible to users designated as under 18 with their Google Workspace for Education account.

• If users designated as under 18 lose access to any third-party apps, these users will be able to request access as part of the error message they will see when trying to login. Admins will be notified of these requests in the App Access Control card on the Admin Console homepage.

[Kim_Nilsson]

Thank you, @Kristal - this is what I have been talking about since before this forum existed, and also the first thing I posted and pinned.

This gives me the opportunity to ask you to relay a request from all of us admins...

The engineers need to quickly implement a setting with which we can enable and disable the ability to request access to both Under-18 and Over-18!!! Most admins have zero interest in what students want to use, but would be interested in knowing what staff wants to use. The list of requests is now quickly being filled with garbage requests from students of things that will never be considered to be allowed, while there is no path for staff to give such feedback.

Also, tell those in power that it was a cowardly decision to make the default setting for Over-18 to allow everything. It should, of course, also have been defaulted to block everything, which is the only proper way to manage user access to unknown services, by not allowing it, unless pre-checked and pre-trusted after an official decision to allow it.

[Kristal]

I'm happy to relay the question and statements that you provide to that team; however, I'm unclear as to what question you want answered.  Will you please advise what question you would like for me to share with that team?  

Thank you

[Kim_Nilsson]

Alright, here are the tl;dr versions. 🙂

1. The engineers need to quickly implement a setting with which we can enable and disable the ability to request access to unknown third-party apps for both Under-18 and Over-18.

2. The default setting for both Over-18 and Under-18 should be to block everything.

Nobody should allow anyone to connect their Workspace accounts to anything and everything out there, and everyone should be able to request access, but only if the admin wants them to!

[Kristal]

Thank you, Kim.  I've sent the long and tl:dr versions to that team.  

[Kristal]

The team wanted me to share:

• Thanks for your feedback. We are working on adding more granular controls for admins to manage turning on/off third party app requests. 

[Kim_Nilsson]

Thanks for the update!