Budgets in education always seem stretched because there are many competing priorities. Getting more out of Google Workspace for Education with Patronum is a good place to start. Using the intuitive interface is easy and you will be quickly improving user environments with policies and intelligent automation. This will help remove some constraints on staff time, their Google resources and hasten the integration of newcomers.
Many people begin with setting up staff email signatures to show all the important information consistently with professional branding. Your main Google directory is often synchronised with a separate school or university information system, but this can only go so far. With Patronum you create onboarding policies that automatically place staff in Google Groups according to role, faculty, department, course, year, location etc. At the same time applying Google Labels e.g. physical location, helps you set up other policies according to specific criteria. This enables cross functional collaboration, the correct data on Google Drive folders is shared and staff can see how colleagues, locations and resources fit together.
Another quick win is setting up onboarding policies for ad hoc engagements or staff reconfiguration to address a specific need. These include short term contracts such as temporary staff to support maternity/paternity leave, agency cover and supply teachers. Patronum gives them access to the correct data from day one in their new temporary job or redeployment. The Patronum Organisational Chart and People Finder will help them understand and identify other staff they may need to interact with. If staff are non-permanent then they are normally given short term access to data which times out when their tenure comes to an end. Any new Google Drive data or email is transferred to a new owner, archived or deleted. These Patronum policies are set up using an intuitive interface with no scripting or expert knowledge of the inner workings of Google Workspace required.
Schools, colleges and academies are often arranged in districts or have shared ownership or affiliation to a non-profit organization. With Patronum you can create a preconfigured set of policies for a new member school or college, ensuring consistency and rapid Google Workspace setup, signatures, shared contacts and calendars, Google Drive folders and resources for staff. Collaboration and inclusion between everyone involved in education is encouraged including students, teaching staff, parents, governors/trustees, administrators and funding authorities. Patronum connects people in Google Workspace through its unique Contacts sharing feature which supports a distribution service, irrespective of which device is used including Apple iOS. This allows a school to select specific Contacts, parents and guardians for example, according to a Google Group or Label, and distribute information to them. Patronum’s storage policies can automatically set up Google Drive folders to allow students to submit their work as part of the Google Classroom virtual learning environment.
Education leaders and their administration support staff have a raft of education standards, employment regulations, workplace safety and data security to comply with. Patronum with Google Workspace will complement other school or university information / human resources systems to ensure data is managed efficiently, protected from misuse and access withdrawn automatically. For example where a Google Workspace account is not logged in for a set period of time a Patronum policy is typically set up to automatically suspend the account. When someone leaves the organization data will be transferred according to Patronum offboarding policies, email may be archived and after a set period of time deleted according to a Patronum retention policy. Also as part of an organization-wide data retention review process Patronum drive compliance is used to remove specific external data sharing and Google Drive data deleted in bulk.
