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Continuing with the series of articles on the Google apps for education admin console, today I review a very useful option that, because of the questions I receive, is not very well known. It’s about audits. The console lets you know what’s going on in many ways, always keeping your data private. Where’s a drive file? How many users have opened it? Who deleted an event from the shared calendar? And a lot of other things.
To access these audits, choose the REPORTS option.
From now on, it’s very simple. On the left we have the audit menu. And services where available.
Let’s focus on one service, which will serve as an example: Drive. If we select it, we can see who performed any of the following actions:
- View (open document)
- Add to a folder
- Changing the name
- Change permits
- Editors configuration changes
- Create, delete, print or download
- Send to Trash
In the screenshot, you can see when and who accessed a particular file. The search was performed by searching by file name.
Similarly, searches could be carried out with other criteria. You don’t always have to search by file name, you can also search by user. This way we could see which files a user has seen in a date range.
In spite of being able to know this data, the privacy of the content remains intact, because if permission has not been given to the administrator, he or she will not be able to see the content.
We can see some other service, like the mail registry.
In this case, it allows us to see who sent or received emails within a certain period of time. The screen corresponds to the emails received by a user:
As before, privacy is guaranteed, at least as far as the content of messages is concerned, since the administrator cannot read them. You can have more details of the email by clicking on it, but you can’t read the content.
Audits are not a commonly used tool, at least in my centre, but they are very useful at certain times. Here I have only presented them, but I encourage you to make tests to see their potentialities.
