Email (Gsuite accounts) / Google groups / Google Drive

Email

To request an account, or remove your account, fill out this form

What you need to know

  • An account allows you to have all the normal google services hosted within Enspiral’s Google apps domain. eg. an Enspiral email address and aliasaes, google drive, google calendar and google groups. But an account isn’t neccesary to interact with Enspiral people or to use the various services and tools.
  • An account costs 90 NZD per year. This bill is separate to the annual contribution.
  • Any contributor can request an account, if they need it to represent Enspiral.
  • If you need an account to work for an Enspiral venture, that venture may be able to pay for the account.

Account security

Ops HIGHLY recommends you keep your account as secure as possible. A few small tweaks will reduce the chance your identity is stolen. Here’s some suggestions:

  • Use a long password. Getting Chrome to remember it is better than nothing (we use 1password and lastpass is good too).
  • Setup 2-step authentication. Seriously, it’s not worth the risks of not doing it. Do Google’s security check up here. Ideally do everything on that page but at the very least setup 2-step and some backup codes in case you get locked out. It’ll only ask you for a code every 30 days either via text or the google authenticator app. Use the app if you’ll be travelling overseas.
  • Make sure your software is up-to-date
  • School up on what phishing is and how to avoid it. There are some really great looking fake gmail login pages out there that will suck up your login details and you won’t have a clue you’ve been hacked, until it’s too late. Read this

Google Groups

What you need to know

Groups allow the following functions:

  • One shared email home
  • Email forwarding
  • Google Drive permissions

You can setup a group in the Enspiral domain or outside it.

Inside Enspiral:

  • You can add non Google addresses to the group.
  • Non Google addresses can not administer the group, so you need someone with an Enspiral account or Ops to do this.
  • It’s a simple way to setup new processes with other Enspiralites.
  • If something goes wrong with the group, Ops can always fix it with their admin accounts.

Outside Enspiral:

  • You can add non Google addresses to the group.
  • Anyone can administer the group which makes it easy to setup.

Using Groups for email

  • A group allows you to have a generic email address @enspiral without setting up another Google account.
  • A group can have many members and they can all control whether they receive the emails that are sent to the group.
  • If you want to forward the emails to a particular tool, you can add the tools generic email address as a member of the group. You could also adjust everyone’s email settings so they don’t receive the emails if it was only for email forwarding.

Using Groups for Google Drive permissions

  • If you share a Google Drive folder with a group, everyone in that group will have access to the folder.
  • Once the folder is shared, you still need to send the link to the folder to everyone in the group.
  • Once each person clicks on the folder link, they need to click on the folder name drop down and select “Add to My Drive”
  • To remove the folder from their my drive, all they do is right click on it and select “Remove”. This will take the folder out of the My Drive but not out of the original place it was created.

Enspiral’s Google Drive

  • Enspiral has one top level folder where everything that’s not in the handbook is stored.
  • Every contributor is added to a Enspiral Contributor group which has access to some of the Enspiral folders.
  • Any file created in one of those folders inherits the permissions of the folder it’s in.
  • You can change the permissions on any individual document you create.
  • PLEASE DO THIS: When you’re sharing with anyone in Enspiral, please make sure the permissions are correct! “Anyone at Enspiral can find and edit” only allows people with Enspiral Gsuite accounts to edit the document. If you want to share it with everyone, ideally place it in an Enspiral folder which should inherit the correct permissions. To be sure, scroll through who the document has been shared with, it should include “Foundation Contributors” Google group. You don’t need to individually add everyone if that group is there.

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