Google Groups
Summary of the toolGoogle Groups is a feature of Google Apps that makes it easy to communicate and collaborate with groups of people—such as project teams, departments, office locations, and special-interest groups.
Pedagogical Uses
A group is like a mailing list: It contains the email addresses of its members, but also has its own email address.
Using just the one email address for the group, you can:
- Send email to group members
- Invite group members to meetings
- Share your content (e.g., Google documents, sites, videos, and calendars) with group members
But that's not all! Google Groups also includes these useful features:
- My Groups—Lists all the groups you belong to. Here's where you can manage your own group memberships, without having to make requests to ITS.
- Groups directory—Lists all the groups for organization. Use the directory to view formation about groups, including group members. Here is where you can also join new groups, without the assistance of ITS.
- Discussion archives (forums)—Records all the communications between group members. Read past messages and even post and reply to group messages.
How to do it
To access your Google Groups, click the Apps button in the upper-right corner and select Groups - or go to https://groups.google.com
Your My Groups page will look like this.
When you click on a group, it will show you all of the messages for the group. Threads that have new messages that you haven't read, are lighter in color. Threads that you've read are darker in color.
For more in-depth information, please review the following resources created by Chad Kafka.
- What can I do with Groups?
- Find, join, and organize your Groups
- Email, invite, and collaborate with Groups
- Manage the topics in a Group
- Post topics and responses
- Create a collaborative inbox using a Group
- Create an email list using a Group
- Create a Question & Answer Forum
- Create a web forum using a Group
How to manage your Group memberships
Want to get a summary of messages sent to a group once a day instead or receiving each message separately? Or perhaps you'd prefer to just read messages on the group's discussion archive (forum page) instead of receiving messages in your Inbox. It's easy to change your group preferences, and even to unsubscribe from a group altogether.
1. Go to your My Groups page and click Edit Memberships
2. You'll see the Manage Memberships page, showing all of the groups you're a member of. From here you can select the notifications you'd like for each group.
To the right of each Group name, you'll see the Subscription type, in the drop-down list. Choose and then save a subscription option:
- No Email: You won't receive messages to the group in your Inbox. You can visit the group's discussion archive to read messages.
- Abridged Email: Once a day, you'll get a summary of new messages.
- Digest Email: Once a day, you'll get full email messages bundled into a single message.
- Email: You'll receive each message sent to the group separately.
- Unsubscribe: Removes you from the group's members list. You'll no longer receive any messages to the group.
Send email to a group
To send an email message to a group, simply enter the group's address as a recipient in the To field. If you start typing the address, it will auto-complete in the field.
Please note that each member of the list sees only the group's address in the message you send—they can't see the other members' names or addresses.
There are limits to how much email you can send in general and to Groups specifically (Sending limits).
Share content with a group
With Google Groups, you can easily share your Google Drive content (documents, sites, videos, and calendars) with multiple people. As you add new members to your groups, they'll automatically gain access to content you previously shared with that group.
For example, if you create a group with the address "marketing-team@mycompany.com" and add five members, you can instantly share a Google document with them, just by sharing the document with the group's address:
If you later add another member, that member automatically inherits permission to access the document or any other content you shared with the group. Similarly, if you remove a member from a group, that individual no longer has access to any content you shared with the group.
Limitations
The biggest challenge with Groups is getting everyone into the group...and making sure that they know how to use their notification settings to be alerted when new messages pop up. Individuals may also be confused by the differences between Google Groups and Google Contact Groups.
Google groups differ from the contact groups you can create in your My Contacts list in Google Contacts (click Contacts in Gmail). The primary difference is that a Google group has its own email address, so it can be shared in our Groups directory and others can send messages to it. Your contact groups, on the other hand, are for your personal use, to make it easy to add a list of addresses to your email messages and meeting invitations. Contact groups don't have their own email address, so no one else can sent messages to them.
Conclusion
Google Groups provide a free way to create a discussion forum that interacts seamlessly with your Google Apps content, and Google Account. This also provides an easy way to manage document and message permissions.
Revision History/Audit Trail
Originally posted on 8/29/2014 by @wiobyrne