gControl Landing Page Settings

Many organizations have portals developed on Google sites which are mostly used as Intranet sites. But administrators have a challenge of making sure that all their users visit the site at least once a day. gControl Landing page setting addresses this concern and allows administrators to set a landing page for the users when they log into their account. The user experience is as below

  • User logs into his/her account via gControl login page

  • He/she will be directly taken to the landing page set by admin, which could be an intranet site, a user specific portal or any relevant site built on Google site.

Note: The landing page has to be a Google site built within the domain to which the user has access to (should be shared with the user with at least view permission). Public websites and non Google site websites are not supported.


Lets see how to set the landing page for the users. Go to gControl control panel and select “Landing Page” option from the quick links from the side menu on right. You will be taken to the following screen

 


By Clicking on Add policy button, you can create policy for your users.

Click on Add policy, and you will see the following screen.






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 (For ex: when the site is under maintenance), you can do it using the “Enabled” option’s On and Off button 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.

  • 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. And users cannot duplicate across policies.

  • Add User: In this section you can define the users on which this policy should be applied.

    • User Based: This will allow you to add individual users one by one or in bulk via CSV. You can also chose all domain users option where all your users would be covered under the same policy.

Add User option will allow you to add users one by one (by providing their domain email id). Import csv will allow you to import a csv of users, so that you can add multiple users at the same time.

    • Organization Unit Based: Following image shows applying of the OU based policy.

All the OUs of your Google apps domain gets listed here and you can apply policy on any OU of your choice. The cross marks (stricken OU names) that you see on the OUs, depicts that these OUs are part of other policies. Hence as mentioned before, the system does not allow duplication of users/OUs.

    • Landing Page: In this section you need to provide the URL of the page that the user needs to be taken when he logs in

    Please note the landing page url should be a URL of the valid Google service on the domain like mail, calendar, drive, Google site etc. Public URLs or non Google apps urls will not work.

    • Map URLs: This is an important section as the settings that you do here will decide the redirection for your users. The setting section is shown below

      • Mail Page: This option will have 2 values. Mail page and Landing page. If you select mail page, then whenever user tries to log into the email url (mail.google.com/a/domain name), user gets redirected to email irrespective of landing page. If you select Landing page in the option, user gets redirected to the landing page (set in the previous option), when ever he tries to log into email URL.

      • Drive Page: This option will have 2 values. Drive page and Landing page. If you select Drive page, then whenever user tries to log into the Drive url (drive.google.com/a/domain name), user gets redirected to drive irrespective of landing page. If you select Landing page in the option, user gets redirected to the landing page (set in the previous option), when ever he tries to log into drive URL.

      • Calendar Page: This option will have 2 values. Calendar page and Landing page. If you select Calendar page, then whenever user tries to log into the Calendar url (calendar.google.com/a/domain name), user gets redirected to calendar irrespective of landing page. If you select Landing page in the option, user gets redirected to the landing page (set in the previous option), when ever he tries to log into email URL.

      • Other Pages: This option allows admin to decide what should happen when the user tries to log into URLs other than mail, drive and calendar. THis has 2 options.

        • Landing Page: This will make sure that user gets redirected to landing page irrespective of the URL he is trying to log in to.

        • Same as Source: This will make sure that the user gets redirected to the same URL that he was trying to log into.

    Note:

    • If your users need to sign into chrome, you need to set the Other pages option to same as source. Else they will not be able to sign into chrome.

    • If you have multiple portals (department wise/user wise etc), you can have different policies for different set of users.