gControl Broadcast Settings

Many a times it becomes a challenge for the administrators to communicate org level policies or any other major announcements. You can always use emails to inform users but people may miss it or you may not have a confirmation of the message actually being read. gControl addresses these concerns. The broadcast feature allows admin to apply policies on either entire domain or selectively on users/OUs. Admin can control the number of times the message should show to the user and also keep track of the users who have read and accepted.


To get started, go to gControl control panel and select Broadcast option from the quick links on right. You would get the following policy creation screen



Click on ADD POLICY to get started with creation of the policy


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Fill in the policy details.

  • Title: Name your policy to easily identify it later when you want to make changes.

  • Description: Short description for helping understand the policy if more than one admin is managing the account.

  • Enabled: For some reason if you want the policy to be disabled for some time and re enable it, you can check/uncheck “Enabled” option as shown above.

  • Valid Always: You can decide the validity of the policy with Valid Always button. Toggling this you can say whether you want a policy for a stipulated time or a policy which is always applied.

  • Valid From and Valid To: If Valid Always is off, then you will have to provide the date range for which the policy needs to be applied. This way admin need not manually turn off the policy.

  • Frequency: This will decide how frequent the user should see the message.

  • Repetition: This will decide how many times should this message show when all the above conditions are met.

  • Message: The text types in this space is what the user will see immediately after log in.

  • Buttons: By default the buttons on the message are named as Next and Cancel. Next button enables the user to proceed and Cancel does not allow him to proceed. He will be logged out if he clicks cancel. Hence admin can change the text of these buttons as per the message and policy, which would make sense to the end user.

  • Type: You need to select whether your policy is User based or Organization Unit Based. Based on the option selected, the add user section will allow you to add users to the policy. Please note a policy can either be user based or OU based. Once saved, type cannot be changed.

  • Add Users: This section is dependent on the option selected in the previous option (Type).

    • User Based: You can apply policy to specific users. In this case the message is shown only to the users on whom the policy is applied.

                        
If the add all domain users check box is checked, the policy gets applied for all the domain users. Admin can also add users one by one using Add user button or add users in bulk using a csv file import.

    • Organization Unit Based: Simpler way of applying policy on bulk users. This will apply policy on the Organization units created in Google apps.

                      


Note: If you have multiple messages to be displayed for same set of users, you can have multiple policies set for the same set of users.