Video: Google Workspace OU Structure for K-12

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0:06
Hello. Let's take a look at a sample of our recommended OU structure for Google Workspace. The first thing we'd like to do immediately from the root of the OU structure is break things down into two OUs, one for staff and one for students.

0:21

This allows us to take any of the core apps or additional services. Turn them on or off for staff for students very easily in one place and one click, and get a large portion of our Google Workspace environment set up very easily.

0:34

Once we have that done, we will go deeper into the staff OU structure. We're looking to do something that makes sense operationally for how we do business.

0:45

Anytime we want to apply different settings or applications to a different group of staff users, we will create and OU.

0:52

We can have an OU for the various staff roles including district office staff and our faculty or teachers. We can also have a staff OU for our IT department which includes our super admins.

1:04

With this structure, we can apply different settings and applications for faculty and staff roles versus IT and super admin staff.

1:13

Next, we will move to the Student OU structure. What we want to do under the Student OU structure first is create our divisions.

1:21

We'll make an elementary OU, a middle school OU if that's something we have at our district, and a high school OU.

1:28

This lets us apply settings, create walled garden approaches, and set up apps and extensions appropriate for those age groups of students.

1:37

Next, we'll break things down to our various schools. Using elementary as the example, we'll have school A, school B, and so on.

1:47

This structure gives us a place to house Chrome devices if need be. Next, we need to make grades. We'll want grade one, grade two, and so on for the student accounts to live in.

1:59

That way we can apply granular settings as needed to those age groups of students. If we're using some form of automation like Google Cloud Directory Sync, we'd probably stop at that level and let that to administer the users and move them for us as needed.

2:16

If we're doing things manually or through CSV importing, we recommend a graduation of you as another level inside of each grade.

2:24

This structure gives you an easy way each summer to move students and progress them through to the next grade level.

2:31

Some other life cycle management OUs we recommend are off-boarding, suspended, test, service access, and share drives. Creating an off-boarding OU and then breaking it out for staff and students gives us a place to move staff and students that are leaving our school and to turn on things like data transfer

2:51

services or preventing those staff and students from creating or storing data on your drive. A suspended OU for long-term suspended accounts is a great idea, and of course having a test OU to sandbox is a great way to troubleshoot problems is needed.

3:07

A service accounts OU can be used for admin roles you assign to those accounts rather than assigning to a user.

3:15

One last thing we'll create is a share drives OU for managing settings for share drives, including the default OU for new share drives.