SPEAKER 1: In my opinion, it's hard to give
new peers a consistently good experience when joining a team.
There are just so many resources one needs to give access to.
And it's hard to get it right from the start, which
can really take a toll on a person's productivity.
Ergo, I wanted to share how to use a Google
Form and a bit of logic in the form's response sheet
to help automate this usually manual task.
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Welcome to the Sheets to App Show,
where we talk about how to tame these tabular beasts
into productive applications.
In this episode, I will cover how to give newcomers
access to resources via a Google Form
and an Apps Script that lives in a Google Sheet.
And let me tell you, friends, using a Google Group
as part of your onboarding strategy
is helpful since you can share multiple resources like Google
Calendars, Team Drives, and files,
training videos, or a departmental Google
site all at once by adding a user to that group
and then have all those resources be
shared with that Google Group's email address.
And as a bonus, any emails that are sent to that group
can also serve as an archive of past questions and answers,
which also preserves team knowledge over time.
Once a Google Group is set up, you or a team member
that has manager rights to add members to that group
can copy the spreadsheet app from the G Suite Solution
Gallery, which is linked to the description.
Upon making a copy, the sheet will
include a script and a form.
The form can be shared as a link on your team's onboarding page
or in a Google Doc and can be filled
in by anyone on your team to give access to new hires
upon clicking Submit since the script runs
with the level of permissions of the person who made the copy.
Ergo, it's important for that person
to have manager or owner rights to that group in order
for new members to be inserted.
Every new submission will send an email
to the new hire confirming they were added,
or it will send them an email that they were already added
if they are part of the group.
If you work within a larger team and wish
to monitor who's helping new hires get access,
you can add a field to the form to collect the email address
of the requester.
And as a member moves off the team,
you can always remove that user from the Google Group
via the group's interface.
And this will revoke their access
to assets shared to that group.
Now, let me dive into the script a bit more.
At the top, you set the two subject lines and the two links
to the Google Doc templates you would like
the emails to be formatted as.
One email is to help the user know that they have been added.
And you can add a list of resources
you would like them to review from the comfort
of their inbox.
And if someone already kindly added this person
to the team's group, the second email template lets them know.
The script checks who is a member of the group,
thanks to the Google Groups service.
And in order to use this service,
you do need to be working in a G Suite account,
since it requires enabling the Admin Directory
API, which is already done for you in the script.
And although you do not need to be an admin
to use this specific sheet app, I
do recommend you share with your G Suite admin
to check out more information on the Admin Directory API, which
is also linked in this video, since it can help them manage
operations on more than just groups
but on specific user accounts, organizational units, and even
devices within G Suite.
One final comment is that every form submission kicks off
the logic to check if a user is a member,
then adds them and sends them an email automatically,
thanks to the OnFormSubmit trigger that you set up
from the scripts dropdown, and accept permissions
to let the app run as you.
And there you have it--
an onboarding tool you can use to give access to new
hires using a Google Form, a sheet, and an Apps Script.
If you found this episode helpful,
community, please click Like and subscribe
to the channel to receive future episodes.
Cheers.
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