Creating a safer email environment
Posted:
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
While most organizations using Google Apps provide unrestricted email access to their users, some schools and businesses need to maintain a safer and more secure environment by allowing certain users to only send and receive email within the organization. This "walled garden" approach has been a popular feature request for K-12 schools looking to provide additional safeguards for student email. It can also help businesses where the email access of particular contractors and other groups should be limited.
Today, Google Apps administrators can create policies specifying who their users can communicate with over email, and administrators can tailor these policies for different groups of users. For example, school faculty and staff can have unrestricted email access while students have the freedom to send and receive emails within the school community but are protected from unwanted email interactions with outsiders.
"Using these new controls finally gives us the ability to provide email to our 40,000 high school students. We are confident that this will help protect our children from inappropriate communications and excited about new class activities and collaboration that email will bring. Not all kids are comfortable speaking up in class and this gives many of them another avenue to approach their teachers," said Laurie Tranmer, Email Services Manager at Prince George's County Public Schools.
This feature will be rolling out over the next couple of days to Google Apps for Business, Education and Government customers. Administrators can configure their policies in the “Advanced Tools” section of the control panel.
Today, Google Apps administrators can create policies specifying who their users can communicate with over email, and administrators can tailor these policies for different groups of users. For example, school faculty and staff can have unrestricted email access while students have the freedom to send and receive emails within the school community but are protected from unwanted email interactions with outsiders.
"Using these new controls finally gives us the ability to provide email to our 40,000 high school students. We are confident that this will help protect our children from inappropriate communications and excited about new class activities and collaboration that email will bring. Not all kids are comfortable speaking up in class and this gives many of them another avenue to approach their teachers," said Laurie Tranmer, Email Services Manager at Prince George's County Public Schools.
This feature will be rolling out over the next couple of days to Google Apps for Business, Education and Government customers. Administrators can configure their policies in the “Advanced Tools” section of the control panel.
This is fantastic news for all those using Google Apps Education edition. I can now safely roll out emails to the students in my Primary school over the next couple of weeks knowing that they can only use email according to policies that I set. Great news.
ReplyDeleteThat's true fact published in the Paragraph 3 of 4 at the third sentence, many kids not outspoken in the classroom but they are able to point out quality messages in writing. Having said, their written words consist of more details than their spoken words.
ReplyDeleteThis is amazing! Exactly what our K-12 environment has been waiting for! Thank you so much for this tool.
ReplyDeleteMichael Sloan
Dir. of Technology
Audubon School District
Audubon, NJ
Can we do something similar for Google Calendars in Google Apps?
ReplyDeleteAm I missing something or is this simply the same thing we have been able to do via Postini for some time now. Granted, it is easier to get to and work with from the Dashboard, but I don't see any particular advantage other than that, and from within Postini you can apply a lot more filters than just limiting domains you can send/receive from. Is there something else here that I'm missing?
ReplyDeleteWill an administrator be able to add an acceptable domain if students are blocked from receiving email from outside of the school domain?
ReplyDeleteSchools often collaborate with other systems. This would be an important feature for the administrator to add acceptable domains.
This is a great addition to Google Apps particularly for Education customers frustrated with Postini. Will there be any future releases to for Google Apps admins to allow specific email addresses from certain domains while blocking all other mail from the same domains? I know you can do this in Postini but just curious. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteHello,
ReplyDeleteI really appreciate all the advances recently that are making Google Apps administration more school friendly! I am wondering how to proceed as there seems to be more than one way to accomplish creating a safe student environment. I am currently doing this with various settings in Postini. It is cumbersome to setup and maintain but seemed to work well. The new method seems much easier and would reduce the redundancy of moving of users to the same ORGS in Google Apps and Postini. Should I remove the Postini settings and now use this new tool? Is there a way to restore to default settings in Postini? Will Postini eventually be phased out for Schools? Thank you for any guidance you can offer!
I am so excited about this! I have been looking for this option to be available for a while and not I feel much more confident about student email and interaction knowing there is no outside email coming into student in boxes! Thank you Google for continuing to be AWESOME!
ReplyDeleteAny chance this will be available on the Standard edition soon?
ReplyDeleteIs there a way to have different restrictions for different sub-organizations? It seems like they have to share the authorized domain settings? I'm hoping to be able to do something similar to this:
ReplyDelete4th grade: email only domain x
5th grade: email only domains x & y
6th grade: email only domains x, y & z