Share, Publish, and Protect a Site

A Site can be shared with specific users, everyone on your school Apps domain, or with the world.

There are different levels of permissions that Sites allows site owners to choose from. Those options are "Owners", "Collaborators", and Viewers". A brief overview of what the different aspects of sharing are:

Owners can (note you can have multiple owners of a site)

• Invite other owners, collaborators, and viewers
• Change site themes, and layout
• Change the site name
• Delete the site
• Do everything a collaborator can do
• Change any page within the site

Collaborators can:

• Create, edit, delete pages
• Move pages
• Add attachments
• Add comments
• Add/remove pages to the sidebar navigation
• Subscribe to site and page changes
• Change any page within the site

Viewers can:

• Only view pages (all pages within the site)

You can invite specific individuals to be editors or viewers. You can also invite everyone with an account on the domain to be an editor or a viewer.

You can also make a site public to view (no sign in or school Apps account required).

Please note: Your school apps domain administrator may have restricted whether you can share your site outside your school apps domain with the public or with users who do not have a school apps account.

**Note this video also includes info regarding page level permissions.

You can invite individuals to have editing or viewing access to your site. 'Owners' and 'Collaborators' have editing access while 'Viewers' can only see the site and not make any changes.

Please note: Your school apps domain administrator may have restricted whether you can share your site with individuals who do not have a school apps account.

To share your site with an individuals, follow these steps:

1. In your site, make sure you are not editing a page (if you see the Save and Cancel button, you are in editing mode). If in editing mode, click Save or Cancel to exit.
2. Sharing your site can be accomplished in a number of ways.

1. Enter in email address of individual (or enter in multiple email addresses, separated by commas)

1. Choose the type of sharing access for an individual or multiple individuals: Is Owner, Can Edit, Can comment, or Can View.

1. Click the Share button.
2. Google Sites can send an email to the individual providing the link to the site and notification that they have access.

1. To send the email notification, click the Share & save button.
2. If you do not want Google Sites to send an email notification, uncheck the Notify people via email checkbox before clicking the Share & save button.

The individuals should now appear in the sharing settings with the permissions you have assigned to them.

The individuals will also see your site in their list of 'My Sites' when logged into Google Sites.

Please note: The maximum number of invites that can be sent at one time is 50 per day. You can add any number of people to your site per day, however the maximum number of invites that will be sent is 50. If you are adding a large amount of people and want to send them all invites, you'll be able to, however you'll have to do it 50 per day.

You can invite groups to have editing or viewing access to your site. Groups can include Apps created groups (i.e. faculty@myschool.org) that your domain administrator maintains, or even regular Google Groups (i.e. class122parents@googlegroups.com). Google Sites has 'smart' group sharing, where if you add or remove people from either of the types of groups, the sharing access will be updated. For example, let's say we create a faculty portal site and have shared it with faculty@myschool.org. Each year when you add new faculty members to the faculty@myschool.org school Apps group, those new members will have access to the Site. Or if faculty leave and you remove them from the group, they will no longer have access to the site. Basically, any change of members in a group is automatically considered with the site sharing access.

When you share with a group, everyone who is a member of the group will have the same access. If you do not wish the entire group to have the same sharing access, you should share the site with individuals.

If you have a list of email addresses from your school Apps domain that you commonly use as a group (a class or students, faculty from a certain department), it may be worthwhile to contact your school Apps domain administrator to create an Apps group so you can take advantage of the group sharing features.

Please note: Group sharing does not work with groups that you create in your contact manager. Those groups are a collection of individual email addresses. While you can find groups that you have created from your contacts in the Choose from contacts menu, Google Sites will not be able to update the sharing access according to changes you make to your contact group. Additionally, when you look for your contact groups in the Choose from contacts link/window, the groups will exist from a drop down menu, but you will still have to select the individual users.

Groups, like individuals, can have 'Owner','Collaborator' or 'Viewer' access.

To share your site with a group, follow these steps:

1. In your site, make sure you are not editing a page (if you see the Save and Cancel button, you are in editing mode). If in editing mode, click Save or Cancel to exit.
2. Click the More menu and select Site Permissions from the drop down menu.

1. Choose the type of sharing access for an individual or multiple individuals: Is Owner, Can Edit, or Can View.

1. To send the email notification, click the Share & save button.
2. If you do not want Google Sites to send an email notification, uncheck the Notify people via email checkbox before clicking the Share button.

The group address should now appear in the sharing settings with the appropriate permissions you have assigned to the group.

The individuals in the group will now see your site in their list of 'My Sites' when logged into Google Sites.

Please note: The maximum number of invites that can be sent at one time is 50 per day. You can add any number of people to your site per day, however the maximum number of invites that will be sent is 50. If you are adding a large amount of people and want to send them all invites, you'll be able to, however you'll have to do it 50 per day.

Many sites you create in your school Apps account may benefit the entire school. For example, your class site is useful to your students, but other teachers at the school may want to use your site as an example for creating their own site. However, if you did not explicitly give a teacher sharing access, they will not be able to access site.

Other types of sites that you could share with the entire school:

• School portal site with student and faculty information
• Extra curricular or student-run group sites
• Guidance/career center site with resources and materials
• Fundraising Site for Booster or PTA organization
• School Newspaper or Online Yearbook

When you share a site with your school Apps domain, you can choose whether you want everyone at your school to have view or edit access to your site. In a school environment, view access may be most common.

Please note: users must log in to their school Apps account in order to view the site. Those without a school Apps account will be unable to view the site.

If you share with a school Apps domain, you can still share the site with individuals or groups. For example, if you create a school portal site that you want the entire school to view, but not edit, you could still add individuals to edit the site as an owner or collaborator. You could also add a group of people (perhaps the school webmasters - e.g. webmasters@myschool.org) to have edit access to the site.

To share your site with everyone at your school who has an Apps account, follow these steps:

• In your site, make sure you are not editing a page (if you see the Save and Cancel button, you are in editing mode). If in editing mode, click Save or Cancel to exit.
• Click the More menu and select Permissions and Sharing from the drop down menu.

You can also access the sharing options from your site settings: More > Manage site > Sharing and Permissions by selecting the visibility options icon at the top of the site.

1. In the Sharing and Permissions dialogue box that opens, select the Change link and then change the visibility options to be viewable by everyone in your domain.

1. Make sure to select the Save button.

Now anyone at your school with an Apps account will be able to log in and see your site.

To remove your school domain from viewing your site, follow the steps above and change the permissions to Private or limit access to only those with a link.

Some sites created on your domain have helpful information for those who do not have school Apps accounts such as alumni, parents, or other educators not at your school. For these types of sites, you can publish them publicly to the world so anyone can view, without having to log in to your school Apps domain.

Please note: Your school Apps domain administrator can restrict sites to be published publicly. If you do not see the option to publish your site to the world, your administrator has restricted this setting. Talk to your administrator to see if this setting can be changed for your domain.

Types of sites that could be published to the world:

• Class sites with information that parents can view.
• School homepage with information about the academic calendar, announcements, school information.
• Athletic sites with information about the team, games, and how to get involved.

Please note: Anything that you include on this site that has sharing permissions must also be available to the public. For example, if you include a calendar on your athletic site, that calendar will need to be published to the public so that anyone accessing the site can see the calendar. If you do not have it published to the public, someone may be able to see the site but not the calendar embedded on the site. The same goes for documents, spreadsheets, and presentations - all of which have sharing access controls. Basically, if you are publishing a site to the world, every element within your site must also be published to the world or visitors will not be able to see them.

To share your site with the world so anyone can view, follow these steps:

1. In your site, make sure you are not editing a page (if you see the Save and Cancel button, you are in editing mode). If in editing mode, click Save or Cancel to exit.
2. Click the More menu and select Permissions and Sharing from the drop down menu.

1. If you do not see this option, it is because your school Apps domain administrator has restricted this setting. Talk to your Apps domain administrator to learn more.
2. Make sure to select the Save button.

Now anyone in the world can view your site.

To remove public viewing access to your site, follow the steps above and change the permissions to Private or limit access to only those with a link or within your domain.