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Jonah P.

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Apr 10, 2013, 2:59:50 PM4/10/13
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Jonah Pollard from Harvard University IT here.  We are in the early stages of evaluating the risks/benefits associated with enabling Google + in one or more of our Google Apps environments.  I wasn't sure how many of you have gone through the exploration process, but figured I would cast a wide net in hopes of getting some valuable feedback. Some things we are interested in learning from the group:
  • How did you communicate the change and privacy related issues to your end users during deployment?  Links to any of your public facing web sites would be great.
  • What challenges or issues have you faced since deployment?  Lessons learned.
  • If your institution has decide to keep it off post exploration, what were the deciding factors?

Thanks so much for your help and best,

Jonah Pollard,
Manager, Cloud Collaboration Services

Harvard University Information Technology
Infrastructure | Unified Communications
www.harvard.edu/huit

Obodda, Stephanie

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Apr 10, 2013, 3:10:40 PM4/10/13
to Jonah P., nort...@appsusersgroup.com
We enabled Google+ at Brown in January 2012. Here's the notification we sent, which includes a link to a publicly available informational page we created:

Starting January 23rd, members of the Brown community will be able to create Google+ accounts with their Brown email addresses. For an overview of Google+, important information about its use at Brown, and a guide on how to get started, see the following link:
https://sites.google.com/a/brown.edu/google-migration-project-site/home/googleplus

As far as I know the only problem we've encountered was a handful of people over the age of 13 mistyping their age as under 13 (mostly because they didn't want to enter their real age) and having their accounts suspended until verification. It would be good to emphasize the importance of entering an accurate age in an announcement - we highlighted it on our page after it happened a couple of times.

Hope that helps,
Stephanie

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Ian Rifkin

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Apr 10, 2013, 3:24:30 PM4/10/13
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Hi Johah,

At Brandeis we enabled it in a separate Google Apps organizational unit which users can opt-in via a custom Web interface we made. The benefit is it only will present the TOS to users that opt-in.

I think the main "problem" we have is communication about the service. We sent an email one-time to people when we first offered it. Other than that they have to discover the page on our website or ask us why it doesn't work!

You can see our informational page here: http://lts.brandeis.edu/techhelp/content/gapps-consumer.html

Regards,
Ian

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Ian Rifkin
Software Systems Manager
Library and Technology Services (LTS)
Brandeis University

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On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 2:59 PM, Jonah P. <jona...@gmail.com> wrote:

Joseph Brennan

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Apr 10, 2013, 3:29:27 PM4/10/13
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> having their accounts suspended

This is what worries us. As we understand it, the Google+ people don't
just suspend Google+ access but cut off access to everything in Google
Apps.

Joseph Brennan
Manager, Email and Systems Applications
Columbia University Information Technology


Todd Sonneborn

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Apr 10, 2013, 3:33:48 PM4/10/13
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We (at Meditech) have had the suspended user problem... and yes... access is suspended for ALL Google Apps... however Google has recently added the ability to unsuspend users via the control panel very easily. We have around 4,000 users and we get maybe 1 person per month that does this. Each time it happens a notification is sent to the admins, so we can fix these pretty quickly and easily.


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Todd Sonneborn
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Medical Information Technology, Inc.
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Kristin Aliberto

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Apr 10, 2013, 3:35:51 PM4/10/13
to Joseph Brennan, nort...@appsusersgroup.com
You do have to turn on  the "premium" features preview you can correct the issue for end users who mis-enter their age:

http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2677443

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kristin Aliberto
Associate Consultant
267-536-9805
Appirio: Accelerating Enterprise Adoption of the Cloud
www.appirio.com



On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 3:29 PM, Joseph Brennan <bre...@columbia.edu> wrote:
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Seung Lee

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Apr 10, 2013, 3:56:50 PM4/10/13
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Users can also verify themselves by entering a valid credit card number or submitting a copy of a state issued ID card. We've only had Google+ enabled for about a week at NYU but already had two or three users get suspended for this. By the time we found out on our end, the user had already verified themselves and had their account unsuspended.

For what it's worth, the Accounts Report from the Report API lists these accounts as being "SUSPENDED_FOR_ABUSE" and "Disabled by operator" which is unique enough to be able to pull out. I've got a script running that pulls the report, parses out those accounts, and emails me a list of affected accounts. The users have usually handled it by the time I'm notified, as I mentioned, but it'll be useful for the cases where they haven't.

-Seung


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Seung Lee
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New York University

Martin Sager

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Apr 12, 2013, 11:53:42 AM4/12/13
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The one gotcha I would consider for Google+ is if they choose to change the Google+ application dependencies. They added Google Calendar as a dependency a while ago and it cut off Google+ to a large portion of our population. 

If you've got specific applications turned off for a population I'd consider what you would do if you'd have to enable that application if you needed it to continue using Google+.

The likelihood of this is low, but I just wanted to point it out as something to consider.


Martin Sager
Collaboration Services
University of Michigan

Jonah P.

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Apr 12, 2013, 2:50:28 PM4/12/13
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Thank you so much for your responses and insight.  The information you provided has been extremely valuable and will support our analysis and potential roll-out.    Thanks again and do let me know if you have any additional insight in the near future.

Best,

Jonah
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