5 things you didn’t know you could do with Google Apps Manager (GAM)

Have you ever struggled with specific tasks in your Google Admin Console that you just didn’t know how to approach? Well, then I think this is the blog post for you! We will show you that Google Apps Manager is a very powerful tool in 5 things you didn’t know you could do with GAM. Make sure you are using GAM securely before you try any of these commands!  

1. List all files shared externally in your organisation

Google Drive lends itself to easy collaboration with anybody. But as we all know, with that power comes some responsibility. Even though Google Workspace has released a more secure way of sharing files through guest access, We still see quite some customers using the function to share a google drive file with a link for external collaboration.

This comes with some risk because when you share a file with anyone with the link, you make that file publicly available to anybody who has that link. Furthermore, we see that nobody revokes this access after a while and these files stay available until the account is deleted 

Make sure to check out our Data Loss Prevention blog where we explain how you can prohibit external sharing based on the content of the file to proactively prevent this. 

Check out this guide to see how you can list all the files currently shared with anyone with the link. If you are on the enterprise plus SKU, you can also achieve something similar with the investigation tool but keep in mind that this only checks drive log data and not the current content in their My Drive and Shared Drive

2. Remove emails from your users’ inboxes

If a SPAM or Phishing E-mail made it into the inbox of your users, it might be tough to see who actually received it and to prevent your users from interacting with that Email. Even though there is a lot you can do to handle phishing in google workspace, it might sometimes be necessary to take the next step!

With GAM you have the ability to touch all your users’ inboxes and delete any message from a specific sender, with a specific subject, or certain recipients… Watch out with this one and make sure you first test your command before you add the annexe “doit” to it. Otherwise, you might lose some emails that you didn’t intend to delete. 

 Check out this link to see how you can achieve this with GAM. Also if you are on enterprise Plus, you can achieve this with the investigation tool.

3. Push an email signature for all your users

A question we get a lot is can we set a global signature for all our users? And the short answer is that it is possible: there is a way to set signatures through GAM. There are two options: 

1. Create one signature for everyone in the company. To set this up, follow the steps described in this link. 
2. Create a personalised signature per user. Check out this doc to see how you can implement this. 

However, we do admit: the process to set it up is quite a bit more convoluted than using the accelerator we’ve built for it.  The Devoteam G Sign accelerator will enable you to create company signatures for all your users without technical hurdles. 

4. Monitor The third-party applications of your users

As we described in a previous blog post about third-party applications, your users have the ability to link their professional account to all sorts of services. And although the google admin console allows you to list all third-party applications your users are interfacing with, it doesn’t say what user exactly has given its right to what application. 

Well here GAM comes to the rescue! With one simple command, you would be able to list all applications and the users that are linked to them. Read here how you can achieve this.

5. Identify orphaned files or the owner of a fileID

What would happen if somebody has a complex MyDrive structure shared across the organisation and suddenly this user just deletes a part of it. Now the top folder will be gone but everything that he didn’t have access to stays on the current owner’s MyDrive. Now, where are those files located? With GAM you can easily identify those files! Next to that you could also do the reverse and see who the owner is of a specific file in your domain. 

How you can list orphaned files, check out this link. To identify the owner of a certain file in your organisation, check out this link.