As the way we work evolves, and remote and hybrid working models become popular options, you may want to migrate from your current system over to Google Workspace. Google developed the suite of productivity and collaboration apps, which form part of Workspace, to operate in the cloud allowing for a flexible work environment that suits the current climate perfectly.

If you have reservations about how your organisation’s data will be handled and the level of control you will have in managing the data and your employees’ access thereof, then rest assured. Google’s Admin Console gives you the control you are looking for. 

One Console to Rule Them All

Google Admin Console is provided exclusively for Google Workspace. It is a centralised dashboard that gives you an overview of your Google Workspace services, as well as your user’s activities, their app usage and more (not to be confused with Google’s Cloud Console).

You can use Google Admin Console to:

• Add and manage users
• Organise your workforce into groups, such as by departments, functions, or locations in order to create mailing lists, web forums, collaborative inboxes, and to control access to documents and Google services.
• Configure security settings to ensure the risk of security breaches is low
• Manage settings on your apps
• Monitor usage and generate reports
• Easily add additional domains or aliases
• Manage your organisation’s Chrome devices
• Import emails, contacts, and calendars from a legacy system
• Customise your employee Google Workspace experience in account settings.
• Select and manage your Google plan’s billing
• Assign Admin Roles

Google Admin Console allows you to easily restrict access to the different features of your Google Workspace and assign administrative roles to users with varying degrees of responsibility and privileges. 

Delegating Tasks

You can share the responsibility of managing your Google Workspace by assigning administrator roles to other users. This way not all the administrative work and responsibility rests solely on one user’s shoulders (which poses a bit of a security risk). 

You can create a custom admin role to assign specific privileges to individual users or make use of the pre-built administrator roles that are already laid out in Admin Console, such as:

• Super Admin: this user has access to all the features in the Admin console and Admin API, and can manage every aspect of your organisation’s account. With “super” power comes a powerful set of permissions. Radical Tip: You shouldn’t use your Super Admin account for day-to-day operations and should consider having two Super Admins in case one needs to take a break every now and then.
• Groups Admin: user has full control over Google Groups tasks.
• User Management Admin: usually assigned to members of the HR team. Users can perform all actions on users who aren’t administrators, such as resetting passwords, managing user accounts, service requests, and the onboarding and offboarding of employees. Privileges can be limited to specific organisational units.
• Help Desk Admin: users can reset passwords for users who aren’t administrators. This administrator can also view user profiles and your organisational structure. Privileges can be limited to specific organisational units.
• Services Admin: Can manage certain service settings and devices, including Calendar and Google Drive, and Docs.
• Mobile Admin: Can manage mobile devices and endpoints using Google endpoint management.
• Storage Admin: Can use the Storage page with full access to Reports and Drive settings.
• Google Voice Admin: Can manage all Google Voice settings. Google Voice is a telephone service that provides a U.S. phone number to Google Account customers in the U.S. and Google Workspace customers in Canada, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.
• Reseller Admin and Indirect Reseller Admin: Only applies to Google Workspace authorised resellers and resellers working with a Google Workspace authorised distributor. 

Some privileges are only available with certain editions of Google Workspace, hardware, or user licenses. 

Generating Reports

Google Admin Console allows administrators to generate activity reports and audit logs of the Admin Console activities of all of their account administrators and users. You can also create a consolidated view of user statuses and account activity. 

From domain-level data down to granular, user-level details, activity reports help administrators to monitor potential security risks, analyse the team’s use of collaboration apps, diagnose configuration issues, track who signs in and when, analyse administrator activity, understand how users create and share content, and more.

Reports can be filtered by organisational unit, group, users or user activity and the report can be exported and downloaded as a Google Sheet or CSV file. 

Types of reports available: 

• Highlights report: An overview of trends and key metrics in your organisation. 
• App report: Charts and graphs giving an overview of all users and admins in your domains. 
• User reports – Accounts: A consolidated view of user status and account activity. 
• User reports – App usage: In-depth look at how your users use Google Workspace apps, such as: how many emails are sent over a specific period, how many files users create and share, etc.
• User reports – Security: View your users’ account settings and exposure to security risks. 

How do you get Google Admin Console?

Google Admin Console is available on Business Starter, Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Essentials, Enterprise Standard, and Enterprise Plus. Unfortunately, Google Admin Console is not included in the free version of Google Workspace.

Google Workspace administrators who need support are able to contact Google Support directly via the Admin Console by phone, chat, or email for free online support for Google Workspace. Google Customer support is not available for users on the free version. However, you can contact your Google Partner, such as Radical Cloud Solutions, for support regardless of your package.

The Admin Console can be found at admin.google.com.

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Radical Cloud Solutions is a proud Google partner that offers solutions in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) for small, medium, and large organisations. If you have any questions or would like to learn more about Google Workspace and how your organisation can benefit from it let us know. Our certified Google specialists are happy to answer any questions you may have.