The Art of Automation Reducing 70 steps in Google to 1 in CloudM

Call us old-fashioned, but there are some things in life that should stay as nature intended. Homemade food, the original Star Wars trilogy. They’re just better that way. But it’s also 2021, and we live in a digital world with more data and processes than ever before. So everything else is fair game. Starting with one of every IT and HR department’s biggest pet peeves... Offboarding users on your digital workspace.

For a medium-sized company with a few hundred employees, staff turnover is a big challenge. Not only the recruiting and replacing, but the administration of joiners, movers, and leavers too. It can be a full-time job(s) to make sure every ‘i’ is dotted and every ‘t’ is crossed.

Now if you’re using Google Workspace, when somebody leaves you’re looking at a 70-step process to make sure they’re offboarded correctly. It requires you to jump around the admin console to find all of the settings you need to change (and need to change correctly) in order to successfully deactivate a user.

And there’s no real way to check whether it’s all been done correctly, either. No big green tick to soothe your nerves about access, or security, or data protection, license costs, and all the other checkboxes that need marking.

All you’ll get is a sea of white forms...

A lot of steps right.

So that’s why our developers built an offboarding workflow inside CloudM, which takes all 70 of these steps and streamlines them into one smooth process. What’s more, it’s a process which covers all bases across three key areas:

This is the big one. Employees who retain access to your systems can wreak some serious havoc if so inclined, so these are the first steps that take place once you start your offboarding workflow:

1. Change password
2. Revoke 2 step verification
3. Revoke application specific passwords
4. Revoke OAuth tokens
5. Remotely wipe mobile device

Next comes usability and cost. Nobody needs to see their old colleagues clogging up the staff directory, and you certainly don’t want to continue paying for their licenses. So once your security is shored up, CloudM will:

1. Set out of office message
2. Delegate access
3. Move user
4. Hide user from the global address list
5. Rename user
6. Assigina alias
7. Remove from groups
8. Unassign licenses
9. Suspend user
10. Delete user

And then for continuity. There’s nothing more frustrating than not being able to access the files and folders of leavers. How else will you continue their projects, or brief new starters?

1. Transfer ownership of documents
2. Transfer ownership of sites
3. Migrate calendar events
4. Transfer ownership of groups
5. Transfer contacts
6. Migrate emails

It really is as straightforward as it sounds. Our technical team has done a wonderful job in creating this automated workflow, which can be customized to suit your specific requirements. It comes from years of research and development, and our clients are consistently singing the praises of how much time, money, and energy it saves them. Like:

Hassan Mansoor of Dennis Publishing:

“We were doing everything manually before, becoming bottlenecks, and running out of time. Now everything happens with just one click of a button. For offboarding, it archives the emails, it changes passwords, removes access, then deletes the user. I must have used it for 200 - 300 people since I joined, which at 45 minutes per person would have taken me a full month of solid work. With CloudM it’s seconds per person.”

Or Angel Quinones of Digital Remedy:

“It’s definitely helped improve the business process. It’s made my part of offboarding real easy; all I have to do is suspend a user and move them to a specific OU within Google. Then CloudM picks it up and starts offboarding for me: changing the username, giving them an alias, setting up forwarding, removing the user from directories, archiving their files. It stores it all too, so I can search everything I’ve offboarded since inception. This is my favorite feature of the platform because it just saves so much time.”

And of course, the same simple process applies to onboarding too.

But that’s a story for another day.

For now, if you want to talk about how CloudM can relieve your administrative burden and modernise your business, please reach out to me through sam.winter@cloudm.io.

Want to know more? Watch our latest Offboarding webinar for more information