Manage Roles in Google Workspace
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you'll be able to:
- Provision a super administrator.
- Add a custom role.
Scale the Administrator Team
You’ve been meeting with the leadership team periodically to report on the project’s progress. One thing you notice early on is that as the company grows and more teams get onboarded to Google Workspace, having just one AwesomeAdmin to manage users and organizational units leaves the company prone to bottlenecks and slowdowns. Certain responsibilities should be delegated to key members of each team. In other words, you need to add other administrators to Google Workspace!
Add a Super Administrator
In this exercise, you grant the Super Admin role to Alex Bell, the IT manager. This is an example of a prebuilt administrator role that’s standard on all Google Workspace accounts.
- If you’re not already signed in, sign in to your domain as the administrator at admin.google.com.
- Click the Users icon.
- Locate Alex Bell in the user list and click to enter his account page.
- Scroll down and select the Admin roles and privileges card. Alex currently has no Admin roles assigned to him.
- Click Assign roles.
- Click the slider for the predefined Super Admin role, and then click Save. You should now see the role has now been assigned to Alex. Now let’s investigate the specific privileges you have granted to Alex.
- Return to the admin console home page click the Admin roles icon.
- Click the Super Admin link on the left to view the current users with this role. At this point, this should only be your initial administrator account, plus Alex.
Each prebuilt role has a specific set of privileges assigned to it. Super Admin’s have all privileges to the entire organization. Let’s look at another prebuilt role and the privileges that are assigned. - Return the list of Admin roles and click Help Desk Admin. Then click the Privileges card and review the assigned privileges. Notice how these administrators can see the organizational structure and have the Read and Reset passwords privileges for users only.
You can assign an administrator role to a user on the user’s account information page, or from the Admin roles page where you define the administrator roles. Creating more than three super administrators for your domain can affect some recovery options. See Add recovery options to your administrator account for more details.
Add a Custom Role
You receive a request from Lars Ericsson, the Human Resources manager.
Hello AwesomeAdmin,
I would like to understand more about how our users are interacting with Google Workspace. That way, I can create a customized training plan for the company. Is there any way I can run reports that track apps usage and user behaviors?
Regards,
Lars Ericsson, HR Manager
You decide that, rather than giving him a prebuilt role with privileges he doesn’t need, it’s best to create a custom role. That way you can delegate the ability to run reports, but not give Lars any other administrator privileges.
- If you’re not already signed in, sign in to your domain as the administrator at admin.google.com.
- From the Menu, click Account > Admin roles.
- Click Create new role.
- Enter a name for the role, for example,
Reporting Role, optionally enter a description, and click Continue. You will now assign privileges to the new role. - You want this custom role to have reporting privileges only so scroll down to the Security category and check the Reports box. Then click Continue.
- Click Create role.
- Click Assign users and add Lars Ericsson to the user list. Then click Assign role. Lars should now appear in the list of users with the new role.
Congratulations! You’ve now built and assigned a custom administrator role to one of your users, which allows you to better delegate administrator tasks in your domain.
You can assign more than one administrator role to a user. Creating multiple roles with fewer privileges is, thus, more versatile than one role with many privileges. If a user handles multiple tasks, just assign multiple roles.
Assigning a custom role to a user grants them access to the Admin console. The privileges determine which dashboard controls are in their console, what information the user can access, and which management tasks they can perform. Learn more about administrator privilege definitions.
Sum It Up
You’ve dived into Google Workspace and started getting it ready for your organization. Part of that is ensuring the organizational structure and privileges meet the scale and security needs of your business. This is important as you seek to integrate Google services into your CRM later on this journey. Great job!
Remember, if you’ve signed up for a trial Google Workspace account, and you don’t plan on keeping it, see About your Google Workspace free trial for information about canceling it.