Google Admin Console: A Beginner's Guide

Admin roles make it easy to delegate who can manage your Google Cloud accounts and what specific actions they can take. Preset roles include Super Admins, user management admins, group admins, service admins, and help desk admins. If none of these are right for a user, you can give them multiple roles or create a custom role.

This part of the Admin console lets you manage settings on your apps and turn Google services on or off. You can also have service-specific settings.

This is the place to go if you want a flexible plan or annual plan, purchase more users, and renew annual plans. You can also choose your billing country’s currency and your payment method.

Customize your employee Google Workspace experience in your account settings. You can upload your company logo and automatically set a language and time zone for new users. You can also choose if you want users to get Google Workspace updates as soon as Google pushes them or on a weekly, scheduled release. Finally, this is the place to designate your Data Protection Officer (DPO) for GDPR compliance.

What happens to all your old emails when you switch from a legacy system to Google Workspace? You can easily bring them over with data migration! This feature lets you import emails, contacts, and calendars so you won’t lose anything important.

This is where you can add and manage Chrome devices for your organization’s Google Workspace accounts. This works on both personal devices—if you’re in a BYOD environment—and on company-owned devices. You can wipe corporate data off of devices, require passcodes, and restrict hardware usage, like turning off webcams or USB transfers. Basic device management is automatically applied when a user signs into their company email address on a device, but it can be manually turned off.

You can use the Admin console to easily add additional domains or aliases to a primary one and whitelist external domains so that your organizations can collaborate through certain Google products.

Organize your workforce by department, function, location, or however else you’d like! Groups makes it simple to put people together into a mailing list, so you can email all of accounting all at once or invite marketing to lunch without having to do a calendar invite for every individual member of the department.

We know that security is a huge concern for our customers, and the Admin console can help protect your business. You can require 2-step verification and minimum password lengths, monitor passwords, and require screen locks on managed devices. You can also allow some, but not all, employees use less-secure apps. These things will keep your breach risks as low as possible.

There are a variety of reports that make it easy to monitor users and their actions. View app usage, file sharing, and the number of users near their storage limits. You can see the number of emails sent over a specific time, the number of non-Google apps installed, and amount of queries in Cloud search. Admin console also provides audit reports of actions performed by admins which allows you to see any system changes.

Last but not least is user management. Admin console lets you quickly add new users, manage the OUs they belong to, and reset their passwords. You can also see their drive usage and view the total storage employees have left.