LinkedIn
Twitter
Hello, fellow Workspace users! Today, we are kicking off our Member Spotlight series with an interview with Community member Ian Crew. Ian (@icrew) lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and has been one of the Community Advisory Forum members who have been helping us before the launch of the new Community site by providing invaluable feedback. As a long-time user of Google Workspace and the former Cloud Connect Community, Ian has some great tips on using Workspace and how to get the most out of the Google Cloud Community.
Read on to learn more about him.
What’s your experience with the Community?
I've been a member of the community since mid-2014, back when it was called "Google Enterprise Connect", and a part of the Top Contributor (TC) team since mid-2016.
What do you get out of this Community? What compels you to contribute?
What I get out of it:
- Perspective beyond my particular industry vertical (higher education)
- Access to expertise from other experienced Workspace admins when I encounter a gnarly problem
- The ability to work with admins from other large organizations to collectively amplify our voice and help influence the direction of Workspace.
- Access to the product roadmaps
Why I contribute:
- I feel it's important to give back to a community that I'm a part of.
- It's a way to be recognized as an expert both inside and outside of Google, which increases my influence when I request or advocate for something.
- I like helping people, especially when it's clear that they've been struggling a bunch with something and I know how to help them get past that hurdle.
- Gamification works.
What are some tips and tricks that you have for the Community?
- The Google Workspace Dashboard is a largely-unknown, but incredibly handy page for users to be able to get quick access to all of the various Google Workspace tools and other apps that you have approved.
- The free, open-source, GAM and GAMADV-XTD3 set of tools, and their associated mailing list are absolutely indispensable tools for any Google Workspace administrator, and absolutely a must-learn. There are plenty of useful things you can do with GAM that you simply can't accomplish via the Google Admin Console.
- If you haven't already, implement a "we don't support third-party email or calendar clients" policy at your company. Very simply, the Google tools just work better/more seamlessly with Google Workspace. Included in that would definitely be the iOS/Android apps.
- Use Shared Drives for anything that needs to outlive the tenure of an individual at your company/institution. Deleting users that own content in MyDrive and have shared it with other users is more than a little painful.
What advice do you have for new Community members?
General community:
- Look at the community as a true community, not just another form of support. If you take the time to be a full participant and build real relationships, it will pay off in some pretty great ways.
- Even if you know only a part of a solution to a question, or maybe just someplace to start looking for a solution, please don't be shy! It's OK if you're not 100% right all the time--the only way to learn is to discuss. It's OK to say something like "I'm not totally sure, but you might try..."
- If there's an opportunity to attend an event in-person or virtually, show up and ask questions. If you've got a question, so do a bunch of the other folks in the audience--just ask!
- If you don't already have access to the Product Roadmap and Feature Ideas sections of this site, go through the process to get access--they're some of the most-useful parts of the whole site.
- There's a separate section for Feature Ideas for a reason. By putting a feature idea there, as opposed to elsewhere on the site, it's much more likely to be seen and upvoted by other users, and seen and acted upon by the Googlers responsible for the various products.
- If you are submitting a feature idea, be sure to explain the problem that you're trying to solve with the feature idea, not just the idea itself. For example, saying "when my users are trying to do 'A', they often get confused by the fact that the buttons to do 'X' and to do 'Y' look quite similar to each other, which leads to this unintended consequence" is far more likely to get fixed than a feature idea that just says "change the color of the button 'Y'".
How does the Community help you on a day-to-day basis?
Largely answered in the "What do you get out of this Community?" question above. There's also a real sense of camaraderie amongst fellow Workspace admins. I think that's part of what makes this community special: rather than it being a place for all levels of users, it's really focused around those of us who are administrators, which makes the signal-to-noise ratio far better than more general-purpose forums.
How did you start using Workspace and what did you use it for?
Back in 2012, my employer chose to move all of our email and calendaring from on-premise solutions to what was then called Google Apps, because our locally-hosted solutions were expensive, space-constrained, and unreliable. We moved ~6,000 calendar accounts and ~50,000 email accounts when we made the switch.
What is your job and how does it tie into Workspace?
I'm the Service Architect for all of the various cloud collaboration apps that we make available to our Faculty, Staff, Students, Affiliates, and Alumni (over 180,000 active accounts). In addition to Google, that's Zoom, Box, Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft 365, Qualtrics, and so on. My role is to lead the technical design and implementation of service improvement, integration, and change projects that affect these services.
I'm also the leader of the Google Workspace track of Google's Higher Education Customer Advisory Board (HECAB), which works with Google to provide feedback and advocate for the needs of the higher education community in all of Google's products.
What's a fun fact about you?
I'm a pretty avid baker, and have been for a few years now (not just a COVID lockdown fad!). I make all of the bread and granola we eat at home, and also make various other stuff like pies, quiches, brownies, muffins, cookies, etc. I generally focus on flavor, not appearance--I can make you a great-tasting cake, but doing elegant decorating is beyond my skill set!
On a more trivia-like level, I was the very first person to ever have a university-provided in-room Internet connection at my university. (I had a student job working for the group in charge of wiring the dorms, and happened to live in the first dorm they wired, so they turned me on first, had me confirm that it actually worked, then turned on everyone else!)
Please share some cool tips and tricks about the products that you use most frequently.
Leveraging the multiple simultaneous editors capabilities of Docs to take collaborative notes during a meeting is still one of the most mind-blowingly useful tips I know. The increase in quality and decrease in effort for everyone is just amazing.
Thank you, Ian, for taking the time to answer our questions. Make sure to check out icrew’s profile and comments for more helpful advice.
Do you have any questions for Ian? Did you know about the tools that he suggested or would like to share your own tips and tricks? Any avid bakers that would like to exchange recipes with him? 🍪🍞
Comment below.