Change is Afoot with Google Workspace (Not Recorded)

See lightning talk presentation.

Participants contributed to 4 categories: general questions, reporting needs, risks and hurdles, and other considerations. Answers to many of these questions will be provided in an announcement in late January, or in FAQs on the project website linked from the announcement.  

General Questions

• Storage space? What's the limit until you have to pay?
• Alternatives? MS OneDrive? UX considerations
• Migration tools?
• When is this happening?
• When will it be communicated and how?
• Default parachute plan for those who can't pay
• What departments or individuals will have access to free storage vs paid storage?
• Will there be consulting services to help units manage the change internally? +1
• Does this include shared drives?
• Google was "born" from Stanford, would they make an exception? Stay free? (Donation?)
• What is the deadline for this transfer?
• What happens to the files owned by a person who no longer works for SU?
• Do we have specific numbers for storage limits and pricing? If not, when will we see that information?
• Has the quota for “free” storage been determined?  What is the cost for those over quota?
• Will we still be able to use Google workspace going forward?
• How will limits/pricing be handled? By department seems potentially problematic since eg a single research lab may have substantial storage requests, but I'm not sure what capability google workspace has to allocate storage for eg a specific shared drive
• Are quota limits different for individual accounts versus group accounts?
• Will native Google files (docs, sheets, etc) count against the eventual quota?
• When is the anticipated rollout date for having Google workspace restrictions? What are those restrictions?
• Will file count restrictions change at all? There is a current limit of 400k files. Can we pay to increase that limit?
• If we don’t currently use workspaces, how are we impacted by the limits for google drive (shared and our own files)?
• What is the free storage limit ceiling?

Reporting Wishes

• Last date modified and by whom +1
• MyDrive & Shared Drive usage/storage by org/unit 
• How widely is a doc linked to (link rot concerns)
• How much is a doc accessed/read?
• Docs "owned" by users who are no longer active employees
• Shared docs (group/dept/...)
• Report on all docs accessible to a given employee
• Large files that haven't been accessed in a long time
• Drive files are either stored within user accounts or shared drives, and shared drives may be managed by different combinations of individuals, workgroups, etc. Who will be able to see what reports?
• How does a department or division get information on who is using google storage and how much so that we might be able to help them understand limits.

Risks/Hurdles

• Losing data
• Access management/workgroup manager (stem) (sunet id stays the same) (ownership of folders)
• Throttling of data migration (what is the background tool to do this work?)
• User acceptance of new standards
• My Drive (will there be size limitations?)
• What is the process to archiving? Data retention time? Touch or not touch (years)
• Communication
• People like Google Drive more than the alternatives
• People who are no longer at Stanford, but they have valuable files in Drive, but they never transferred their ownership +1 +1
• For certain use cases of large file archival, storing files outside of Google Drive may be more cost effective, but I can envision difficulty around files being spread out in many different locations - gdrive, S3, Oak, 
  • Has there been any evaluation of other services that could be subscribed to (Box, O365, …) or even run directly by Stanford (Nextcloud, …) that could provide equivalent functionality while having the ability to back subsets of files by cheaper archival storage without having to split where files are located between multiple services?
• Need good notice about the implementation timeline for storage limits. Would like to have 6 months notice. We have lots of cleanup to do!
• Do any of the alternatives have anything like Google Drive’s search capabilities?

Other concerns/questions

• There are many options for storage at Stanford, Google is only one option. Is there a quick matrix that would allow users to understand the costs of each so that they can make an informed choice?
• 3rd party tools for moving large data sets +1
• Maintaining data for audit purpose
• Lifecycle of docs-who decides
• Archiving inactive data / offboarding +1
• Make sure data that is moved is easy to search and find
• Data restoration/retrieval?
• Environmental impact of the project (carbon emissions, etc)

List of those interested in helping further

• Don Cameron (djac@stanford.edu)
• Jonathan Romano (jaromano@stanford.edu)
• Justus Freeman (justus.freeman@stanford.edu)
• Patricia Rice (pbs321@stanford.edu)
• Sohanny Sandoval (sohanny@stanford.edu)
• Lonlone Lee (lonlone@stanford.edu)
• Sreem Konduru (skonduru@stanford.edu)
• Hannah Frost (hfrost@stanford.edu)
• Jim Bishop (jmbishop@stanford.edu)
• Jessica Huang (huangsu@stanford.edu)
• Leda Muller (lmuller@stanford.edu)
• Glenn Peacock (gpeacock@stanford.edu)
• Amit Srivastana (amitsr@stanford.edu)
• Brian Young (brianyoung@stanford.edu)
• Brendan Lien (blien@stanford.edu)