Does Google limit admin roles?

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David Walton

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Sep 23, 2022, 1:59:52 PM9/23/22
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Is there a limit to how many users can have a particular admin role? I added 1000 users to an admin role, and noticed that the Google Workspace admin console started slowing down and delivering errors, and GAM stopped assigning users at around ~1000.

Is that because I added too many at once and overloaded the system, or because I hit a user cap?

Jay Lee

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Sep 23, 2022, 2:04:17 PM9/23/22
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I'm scared to ask... why do you need 1,000 admins in your organization?

Jay Lee


On Fri, Sep 23, 2022 at 1:59 PM David Walton <david....@biola.edu> wrote:
Is there a limit to how many users can have a particular admin role? I added 1000 users to an admin role, and noticed that the Google Workspace admin console started slowing down and delivering errors, and GAM stopped assigning users at around ~1000.

Is that because I added too many at once and overloaded the system, or because I hit a user cap?

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Walter Moore

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Sep 23, 2022, 2:18:12 PM9/23/22
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Are you confident that this many users need admin privileges? Are you administering hundreds of sub-domains?

On Fri, Sep 23, 2022 at 1:59 PM David Walton <david....@biola.edu> wrote:
Is there a limit to how many users can have a particular admin role? I added 1000 users to an admin role, and noticed that the Google Workspace admin console started slowing down and delivering errors, and GAM stopped assigning users at around ~1000.

Is that because I added too many at once and overloaded the system, or because I hit a user cap?

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David Walton

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Sep 26, 2022, 2:46:04 PM9/26/22
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We are hoping to allow hundreds of users to migrate My Drive data to shared drives. We created an admin role with the sole privilege of "move folders to shared drives," and have been testing it for some time. Obviously our help desk cannot perform password resets or 2SV recovery for these users, but we have workarounds for that.

Our goal is to give all employees of a certain type (~1000 users) this admin role during a concerted effort towards shared drive migration, and then remove the role.

Jay or Walter, do you see any other issues with this plan?

P.S. I know that Google encounters various errors when migrating folders to shared drives (e.g. if any of the folder contents is owned by an outside org). We've captured as many of these errors as possible and created Tier 0 support documentation to help users during the migration process.



Ross Scroggs

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Sep 26, 2022, 3:49:34 PM9/26/22
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David,

You could make two roles: MoveToSharedDriveAL and MoveToSharedDriveMZ; assign based on first letter of last name.

Ross

Ross



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Ian Crew

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Sep 26, 2022, 4:08:30 PM9/26/22
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Hi David:

There are file permission issues you need to be aware of if you do this. Specifically, in the case of a folder containing items that the person who has this admin permission doesn’t have access to. So for example, if I had a folder called “Operations” with subfolders “Facilities” and “HR”. If the person you give the “move folders to shared drive” admin permission to has access to “Operations” and “Facilities” but not “HR” in MyDrive, if they move “Operations” to a Shared Drive, they (and all other members of the Shared Drive) will also get full access to “HR” in the Shared Drive, even though they couldn’t access it when it was in MyDrive. And due to the “waterfall permissions” model of Shared Drives, there’s no easy way to re-revoke access to the “HR” folder once it’s been moved. 

It’s really critical that both the people being given this “move folders” permission as well as whatever policy/privacy/security folks you have, are aware of this potential issue. 

Cheers,

Ian

At least for us, that’s a sensitive enough. 

 

Ian Crew

Solutions Architect
Productivity & Collaboration Services
Berkeley IT

Ian Bevan

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Sep 27, 2022, 4:52:18 AM9/27/22
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Does this help from here
Screenshot 2022-09-27 095125.png

David Walton

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Sep 28, 2022, 11:44:36 AM9/28/22
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Thanks, Ian!

Yes, we're being quite vocal about how Shared Drive permissions work. Specifically, the language we're using is "Each member of a shared drive can see all the content within that shared drive." We've been working with departments to ensure that they have multiple shared drives to accommodate their various teams.




David Walton

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Sep 28, 2022, 11:56:08 AM9/28/22
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Ian (Bevan).

Ah, this is helpful. Somehow I missed this. So only 500 admins can be assigned in a given OU. We have an /employees and a /faculty OU, and about 700 employees who would receive the admin role, so we'll need to come up with a solution.

Ross, that would explain why we had issues when we did this manually. It seemed to work, but the Google admin console went on the fritz every time we loaded the admin roles section with no error reporting or explanation of what was happening.

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