- What we're gonna go through here
is some of the basic policies that you can set up
inside of Chrome
which can make your life a whole lot easier.
And I really love Google Chrome
and obviously the G Suite and the Google Ecosystem.
And what some of these policies do is they
bridge the gap between using G Suite
for just administrative purposes
and then actually utilizing G suite
as like enterprise solution for your, for your business.
So what we're really talking about here
is using G Suite to perform
some mild computer management type tasks.
It may be things like
changing the desktop background on a Chromebook
adding or removing features inside of Google Chrome.
What it also allows you to do is even like push down apps
and plugins, which I'm gonna take you guys through.
And so this is really useful
if you've got a number of employees,
they're all working in your business
and you wanna have some way of kind of managing
what they have access to within side the Chrome browser.
Now, of course, if you're using Chrome books or Chrome boxes
which are Chrome iOS devices.
You're gonna have much more control over what you can do.
But, for anyone who's using a windows machine
or a Mac machine
you can actually control the Chrome browser
as long as they're signed in
with their business G Suite account.
So for anyone who signed in,
then you're actually gonna get access to be able to use
some of these tools and some of these policies.
And I'm gonna show you some of the simplest
and most basic ones that are super duper useful.
So in the admin panel, if you've not been there yet
before it's admin.google.com
pretty straightforward to get to.
And for us to get to our Chrome management,
we wanna go to the devices menu.
Now this is where you can manage a multitude
of different devices.
There are actually options to manage mobile devices.
So there's a small level
of management available for mobile devices.
And then you also have available the ability to
manage obviously Chromebooks and Chromeboxes.
So we can push down hardware based policies to those.
But what we're gonna be working with today
is the Chrome user policies.
And the Chrome user policies get applied
to anyone that signed into a Chrome browser.
Now who is signed into a Chrome browser.
And how do you do that you may ask
well, you just click into Chrome.
So you can see in the top right-hand corner
of Google Chrome, and this'll be the same
whether you're on a windows machine or a Mac
you will have they're the little man.
And with the little man, you can click that button
and then sign in with your business account.
And so once you sign in with your business account
that's gonna mean that it synchronizes
all of those settings and policies
from your business account to that Chrome browser.
Now, you wanna make sure
that you're doing that with the business account
and not with like a personal Gmail
because what that gives you the ability to do
is to actually have all of those policies
from the business, push down to your machine.
And also when you sign it with your business account
obviously it's going to synchronize your bookmarks
to any computer that you're using.
What we find is some customers accidentally
will sign in on one computer with their Gmail account
like a personal account, and then another computer
with their business account and things end
up getting a little bit messy or out of sync.
So you want to make sure you're signed in.
And importantly, you wanna make sure all of your staff
are signed in as well.
Super important that all your staff say signed in
with Google Chrome, because otherwise
they're not gonna get these policies pushed down.
So that's what it looks like to get signed in.
And that's the number one step to make sure
that it's working properly.
Okay, so you may notice there's a new menu item
right down the bottom here that says windows settings
and Google are actually beginning to let us have
some settings and control over windows desktops
which is pretty interesting.
And I'd say pretty awesome as well.
What that means is
we're starting to kind of like bridge the gap
into the arena of Microsoft's active directory product
which is the product that kind of runs
on a server and then manages all of the desktops.
Log-ins printer, sharing, credentials, desktop settings
and all those kinds of things.
And obviously this is all part of G suite.
There's no extra charge for any of these features.
And so the cool thing is we're
starting to see Google really try
and replace that corporate server model
with building in what would normally be happening
in a paid active directory licensing scheme
for free with G suite, which is pretty darn cool.
And so myself having managed literally thousands
of different businesses, computer network.
Allowing us to use a tool like this
to manage desktops without having to do
any of the Microsoft stuff is just an absolute godsend.
And we're really excited to see Google's development
in this area.
And even though it's not always relevant to
small businesses as new features come
to this style of management with windows.
Then we will be sure to create videos
and share what's going on there.
Let's get into our actual policies now.
So I mentioned that these are user policy
they're not computer policies or device policies.
Now what that means is it's going to be implemented
on the user level.
There are some device policies that you can create
for Chromebooks, and it might be
like change the background picture
for anyone that uses this device.
That is certainly an option
but the user based policies
mean that it's gonna be tied to user account.
And it's also going to be tied to the organizational unit
that someone is in within the G suite account.
But most of our audience are small business owners
and don't even bother setting up different groups
and organizational units inside the admin panel.
We're just gonna keep things super simple for now.
So let's go into our Chrome devices here
and that's just gonna kind of show you
what the Chrome device menu looks like.
So if you're managing Chromebooks or Chrome boxes
they're gonna show up here.
And the organizational units that I talked about
actually appear here on the left-hand side.
Then we're gonna go to our device management menu.
And then after we've opened up there on the left-hand side
you can see here, we have device settings
and then we have mobile settings.
So we need to go into Chrome management.
So after we've opened up Chrome management
this will allow us to start to set some of our policies.
So you can see here we've got device management
managed browsers, which is a paid license for Google Chrome.
It gives you some extra features, not really relevant
and we'll cover that in a different video.
But the ones that I want to show up today
are in user and browser setting.
And so inside user and browser settings
you will be able to see here
we've got a bunch of different options.
And so I'm going to scroll down
and show you some of those options.
Don't waste your time trying to read
or understand every single one of them.
'Cause there's a whole bunch, but I'm going to
show you guys some basic ones that are the most powerful.
Now first up my favorite one
is to create a shared bookmarks folder
for everyone inside the company.
And so shared bookmarks allow you to push down
a set of company-wide bookmark to everyone in the business.
And so you can see here that I've called mine links
and it just appears in my bookmarks menu.
So anyone in the business
who is signed in with a business account
is automatically going to have their bookmarks
showing up there.
So you can see here, I've got all of the links
that links to (indistinct) net
which is our intranet site got linked to a (indistinct).
Got a link to the partner console.
That's important linked to our website
basically whatever you want, it might be zero.com
whatever you can push down links
and have them available for everyone.
And so with that links menu
let me show you how we go and set it up.
We're gonna go to user settings
and it's actually called managed bookmarks.
So if you search for bookmarks
you can see here managed bookmarks is the settings.
So it's the only one that it's brought up
and here I can actually choose locally applied
or inherited from default basically means,
do you want this to just automatically follow
what Google's recommendation is?
Or do you want to locally apply it?
So we want locally applied locally applied means
that we're gonna set configure the policy
pretty basic there.
And then all we have to do is we give the folder a name.
I use links cause it's nice and short.
And then we actually start adding URLs into the links here.
So that's pretty straightforward.
You just hit the plus button there.
And let's say, for example, if I wanted to add new URL
and it was zero, I would add zero there.
And then I'd add the URL zero.com.
And then all I need to do is go ahead and click save.
And then basically
as long as I'm at the top level of my company,
which I am right now.
When I hit save, it's gonna automatically
push that down to everyone's browser.
Now it might take up to 30 minutes
for any policy change that you make to be applied.
So if it doesn't appear immediately
can take up to 30 minutes,
particularly if you've got a lot of users.
But if this is a change that you're just making
on a small account,
and I'm talking about like sub 50 users on your account
they tend to go through pretty much instantaneously.
So that's managed bookmarks.
We're gonna set up a number of bookmarks here
and they are gonna be automatically applied.
This is another one that I like to do is the bookmarks bar.
And so the bookmarks bar along the top there
you can actually choose whether or not it is visible or not.
Now personally, I like to keep mine hidden.
But you may wish to show the bookmarks bar
for all of your staff.
Now I've got a pretty tech savvy crew that worked for me.
And so I can kind of get away with our team
just having an expectation
that their bookmarks will be available
to them no matter what,
as soon as they open a new tab
it's gonna show the bookmarks here.
But as you can see here
when I'm browsing around it doesn't show them.
You may choose to force the bookmarks bar on everyone.
And if you wanna force the bookmarks bar,
what it means is
you can make it always available for everyone.
So let's go ahead and search for that one again.
So it's under the user experience menu.
If you search for the word bar,
I can either allow the user to decide
I can disable the bookmark spa
or I can force enable it.
So we're basically forcing enabling it
to appear for everyone.
I may choose to switch on
if I had maybe a less tech savvy team
and I wanted them to always see their bookmarks
along the top and always see
that links folder that we just created.
That would be one way of ensuring
that people are actually using it.
And they've got access to everything that they need.