Google Workspace comes with standard directory fields, like Employee ID and Cost Center, but administrators can also capture additional information that is important to their school or institution. These fields are called custom attributes, and administrators define them. Gopher for Users makes viewing and maintaining these custom field values from Sheets a snap.
With custom attributes, you can:
- Add even more data you want to record; for example, assign different data types to special value fields, such as number, date, and email.
- Control visibility of the information. You can make it public to all users in your organization or keep it private, visible only to administrators and individual users.
When using Gopher for Users, custom fields appear in the Manage Existing Users sheet as long as you enable those attributes in the sheet. You can then update these fields in bulk using the Update properties & attributes feature. While you can make these changes directly from the user information page in the Admin console, this method only allows you to update one user at a time.
Learn more from Google's help guide
Let's take a look at some specific examples of user attributes in a school setting:
Case 1: Give Student Users a Unique Student ID From the Sis to Avoid Account Duplication
In smaller districts and institutions, student accounts are typically created manually from SIS exports. Depending on your account-naming conventions, differentiating between pre-existing and new students, or students needing of de-provisioning, can sometimes be a confusing and error-prone process. When all student accounts have a private Student ID as part of a custom Student Info attribute, you can use spreadsheet formulas, like VLOOKUP or COUNTIF, to cross-reference a new-users list against all existing users to flag and avoid account duplication.
Case 2: Populate Values Relevant to 3rd Party Software or Inventory Management
Some 3rd party software can integrate with custom Google Workspace directory fields, or in cases where devices are assigned to individuals; it may make sense to tag these users with this additional custom info.
Case 3: Give Student Users Additional, Searchable, or Otherwise Useful Identifying Information Like Homeroom, Faculty Advisor, or Cohort
Depending on the size of your district or institution, it may make sense to allow students to be visible within the contact directory and to include additional fields that could be useful to staff and peers when viewing them within the contact directory.
| As seen in legacy Contacts | As seen in new Contacts |
It may make sense to set these fields to private and give all staff a Google Workspace role, such as View all directory fields that allow staff to view private student user profile info while protecting it from view by students.
These same fields can be queried by an administrator within the Google Workspace admin panel search bar using the standard Google Workspace admin user search query syntax. For example, the search query for all users with gStudent -> Advisor equals Jones would be gStudent.advisor='Jones' and might show results as seen below.
See Create custom attributes for user profiles
| Document Version | Date | Description of Change |
| 1.0 | 8/19/2024 | Updated text, made it clear this is instructions from G4 Users |