Google Workspace is an incredibly powerful tool for businesses of all sizes. But its power can be overwhelming, and administrators need to ensure that their organizations get the most out of it. Automating repetitive manual tasks helps administrators save time and energy, allowing them to focus on more strategic or interesting projects.
In this article, we’ll review the most popular automation scenarios for Google Administrators and provide practical guides and ready-to-go templates on how to set those automated workflows with zenphi – the only no-code automation software built specifically for Google Workspace.
Automate User Provisioning
User provisioning is the process of creating, updating, and deleting users in Google Workspace. This can be extremely time-consuming, especially when done manually. At the same time, poorly established user management can slow down your whole organization’s operations:
– The delay in creating a new Google Workspace user can damage the employee onboarding experience;
– Improper user deletion within the employee offboarding workflow will negatively impact organization security.
That’s where automation comes into play. By automating user provisioning, administrators can allow an HR specialist to initiate employee onboarding or offboarding by simply filling in the Google Form and putting the rest of the workflow on autopilot. As a result, this will remove the bottlenecks between HR and IT, save time, make the process much more efficient, and improve the employee experience.
Another huge benefit of automating user provisioning is that it can help improve security. For example, automating user offboarding ensures that employees who leave the organization don’t have access to sensitive data and shared items or use up licenses which cause potential security issues and vulnerabilities.
Launch zenphi’s Employee Onboarding & Offboarding automation template.
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Automate Reporting
Google Workspace Directory provides a robust set of tools for managing and tracking user data. And with the power of automation, you can save a significant amount of time and effort while getting and sharing this data. Just imagine that you and your team can get an up-to-date, accurate report every Monday morning with the exact data on user activity that you need right in the inbox. And all of that without pushing a single button.
Whatever your organization’s requirements, you can set automated reports for your use case. For example, you can get data on the following:
– how many licenses have been assigned within the given period;
– how many people are in the organizational unit;
– the list of users that have been inactive for more than a month
and more!
You can even take a step further and delete, suspend or archive those inactive users, which will help your organization save on Google licensing costs.
Check out the webinar recording where zenphi’s COO shows how you can automate inactive usage reports and deactivate Google Licences accordingly.
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Automate Group Management
If you are a Google Workspace administrator or manager, you might already be using Groups to organize your email lists or assign staff to departments. You can even assign access policies to your Groups to improve your workspace security. Moreover, moving users to and from groups is much more efficient for handling access to files, folders, and other application access points.
Yet, you can take group management one step further with automation. Imagine setting up an entire project generation workflow. That’s automatically creating a group, assigning users, generating a Shared drive and custom folder directors, and creating a group calendar and chat space, all with a click of a button.
Launch zenphi’s Project Builder automation template.
Likewise, you could use automation to set up a project onboarding flow for new team members joining the team. Assign a new team member, and bam! Automatically send them a welcome email, perhaps a follow-up instructional email series on what they need to know, assign a mentor, and give them their first task and all with a couple of button clicks.
Launch zenphi’s Project Assignment automation template.
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Automate Email Management
Email management is an essential task for any Google Workspace administrator. This can include:
– Provisioning common Gmail labels;
– Creating custom filters in Gmail;
– Adding aliases;
– Creating forwarding addresses;
– Creating mailbox delegations;
– Updating email signatures
and more.
Gmail automation can save a tremendous amount of time and ensure that emails are properly managed within your entire organization.
Launch zenphi’s Email Signature Management automation template
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Automate Password Resets
As a Google Workspace administrator, it’s crucial to stay on top of user accounts, resetting passwords when necessary. Automating this process can help you save time and effort while ensuring that user accounts remain secure.
Automation ensures that all passwords are reset according to the company’s security policies and standards, thus providing a much higher level of security and eliminating any potential risks. It also enables employees to easily reset their passwords by request in a matter of minutes, helping to ensure that the company’s confidential data remains safe and secure. This process helps to provide a secure environment for employees and helps to protect the company’s data from any malicious activities.
Launch zenphi’s Reset Passwords automation template
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These are some quick ways to make your admin life easier!
While you can automate your Google Workspace admin activities by coding with Apps Script, there is a more efficient option that frees up IT teams from simple, mundane or repetitve automations. Let’s take a closer look:
Apps Script
Apps Script is Google’s development platform for creating automations within Google Workspace. It is a powerful tool that’s fantastic for achieving complex workflows if the IT team has time to build them, but it comes with a few drawbacks, particularly for teams that need to manage multiple automations. For example, even for simple automations it requires specialist code development knowledge (or a steep learning curve!) and a significant period of time to build and debug. Additionally, the code can be incredibly time consuming to update and maintain, often bogging IT teams down with small edit requests from other departments.
Zenphi
Zenphi is the only no-code process automation software built specifically for Google Workspace products like Gmail, Drive, Sheets, Forms, and more. Zenphi can be a powerful alternative to Apps Script in many case. Its intuitive and easy-to-use interface enables easy automation of common tasks for any team, and with a growing list of 80+ thoughtfully developed integrations, is capable of connecting and streamlining processes between all areas of a business. With zenphi, you can build powerful automated workflows in only a few drags and drops, in a fraction of the time it takes to code.
Eager to try it out yourself? Follow these three simple steps:
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- Create a new Space for your process.
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- Find a Google Workspace Admin template and launch it.
Inside this template, you’ll find ready-to-go workflows for:
– Updating Email signatures using Google Docs template;
– Reset Password Requests;
– Employee Onboarding on Google Workspace;
– Employee Offboarding from Google Workspace;
– Creating a new Google Group;
– Exporting user’s Vault data
Also, check out our webinar recording where zenphi’s CTO, Aravin Srinivasan, guides you through the setup process:
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Conclusion
Google Workspace is a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes. As a Google Workspace administrator, it’s important to identify processes that can be automated to save time and resources. By automating user provisioning, group management, security settings, reporting, and email management, administrators can streamline the entire organization’s processes and ensure that their Google Workspace environment is secure and compliant.
