Google Slides/Docs custom templates disappeared (Workspace for Education Plus)

[sikandern]

At the start of this school year, we have noticed that all custom templates for Google Docs and Google Slides have disappeared from our organisation. We can of course re-upload them, but we (the only two workspace admins) have no clue as to why these templates are gone/invisible. If we do not know this, it might be pointless to re-upload them …

Does anybody have the same problem, or can anybody help us finding the cause of this issue?

[Jan-Carlos]

Hello @sikandern !

I conducted some tests, and here’s what I observed:

How the custom templates function works:
When you upload a file to the gallery, it acts as a shortcut rather than a fully independent file. This means that if you delete or move the original file to the bin from your storage, it will also be removed from the gallery.

When the file is hosted in the owner’s “My Drive”:
If someone else has editor permission on the original file, they can remove your file from the gallery, even if they are not the owner. The file won’t be deleted, just removed from the gallery. Additionally, if someone only has reader permission on the original file, they cannot remove it from the gallery but can still use the template as intended.

When the file is hosted in a "Shared drive":
If someone else has editor permission on the original file, they can remove your file from the gallery, even if they are not the owner. The file won’t be deleted, just removed from the gallery. However, if someone has only reader permission, they cannot create a file from your template at all, although they can still see the template in the gallery, which essentially renders it useless to them.

Changing the model configuration in the admin console only impacts the upload process and does not affect how items in the gallery are managed for those with editor or owner permissions.

UPDATING:

If you use the default templates & themes(Supported editions for this feature: Business Plus; Enterprise Standard and Enterprise Plus; Education Plus), you can use the template without the risk of someone else delete the templates. 

https://support.google.com/a/answer/13135006

Hope this helps!

[sikandern]

Thanks for your quick reply!

But this is strange: when we upload a template, we get the option to use a copy of the doc that serves as the template. The only thing is: I don't know where the copy is. When I try to re-upload the template to the gallery, I get the message that it's already there. So where is 'there'?

Also, the docs we use as templates are not shared at all: the whole organisation has 'viewer' permissions, and nobody has 'editor' permissions. They simply live in the private Drive of one of my coworkers.

The workaround is to make a copy in my drive, and upload that one as a template. But than it becomes silly, because (1) I don't want to end up having to upload templates every week, of course, and (2) I still don't know how the older templates disappeared from the gallery.

Do you know where or how I can find the logs, in order to find out what precisely has gone wrong?

Kind regards