TU3.19: Automation for Admins: Command line management for Google Workspace with GAM

Full Show

Audio only (podcast)

Show Notes

Broadcast Date: 15 July 2021

Guests:

  • Jay Lee - Google Strategic Cloud Engineer for Workspace

In this episode we are joined by Jay Lee, creator of Google Apps Manager (GAM). GAM is an open source command line tool for Linux, MacOS and Windows which allows administrators to easily manage domain and user settings in Google Workspace. GAM is particularly useful for running bulk operations running commands in parallel from a text or .csv file. This episode will be an opportunity to find out how you can start automating your Google Workspace administration as well as some of the newer GAM features.

Resources:

Show contents:

  • 02:00 Introduction to Jay Lee and the GAM command line tool

  • 09:18 Overview of the Google Workspace APIs used by GAM and permission levels

  • 14:00 How Jay uses GAM for migration and clean-up

  • 18:11 Support and resources for using GAM

  • 23:50 Best approaches for learning how to use GAM

  • 29:00 Preventing GAM horror stories

  • 34:30 Areas where GAM can be enhanced

  • 37:00 Jay Lee's favorite Google Apps Script solutions (inc. Google Chat bot for Workspace updates)

  • 41:30 Jay Lee's other projects including Gmail back-up/restore tool

  • 50:15 Using Google Sheets to prepare GAM .csv batch scripts