Group accounts
Why a group account over an individual account?
Whether you want to create a distribution list to send the same information to multiple recipients at the same time (e.g., hq.heaquarters@jobandtalent.com) or you want a general / group account to reply to customers (e.g., support@jobandtalent.com), Google groups are the way to go for several reasons:
1) Security: While some people are used to create additional personal accounts for different uses, these accounts are always a great source of problems down the road. Passwords are either shared with too many people or forgotten, and if the account owner leaves Jobandtalent, all the mails and drive information associated with the said account can be lost, usually impacting a lot of people.
In contrast, it is impossible to lose access to groups, since they do not use passwords (that does not mean that they cannot be protected) and they can remain active even if all members of the group leave the company.
2) More functionalities: If you need to share the new account with more people, having an individual account usually leads to different people managing the account differently and thus, operating inefficiently due to loss of information ("where did that email go?") and even information duplicity if 2 or more people reply to a message at the same time from different computers.
Google groups allow members to split tasks / emails efficiently and avoid these issues all together (see "collaborative inbox")
3) Cost-efficiency: On top of said security and information handling issues, google accounts come at a premium for enterprises while you can create as many google groups as you want for free, heavily bootstrapping the company's IT budget
How do I create a Google group?
1) To create a new Google group, just go to: https://groups.google.com/my-groups and click on "Create group"
2) Once clicked, you can select the group name, the group email and even a group description
3) Then, you will have to decide some of the group's settings:
- Who can join: only invited users (so only the group owner specifically invites), anyone in Jobandtalent can ask to join or anyone in Jobandtalent can directly join
- Who can view conversations: this is who can receive emails from the newly created group
- Who can post: this is who can send emails to the newly created group (if you want external people to send emails to the group, select "anyone on the web")
- Who can view members: this is who can view the list of people who are part of the newly created group
4) Finally, you will be able to select who joins the group under which access level (group member, group manager, or group owner)
- You will also be able to select the "subscription" of new members. This means whether you want members to receive emails when someone writes to the group email or not (99% of the time you want to leave this option as "each email")
Do I need a collaborative inbox?
So, congrats! You just created your first Google group. Now, as we mentioned earlier, there are two main types of groups:
a) Distribution lists: you just want to send the same email to multiple people at the same time. Nobody needs to write emails under the group name. Example: es.spain@jobandtalent.com
b) Collaborative inbox groups: you want to write emails under the group email and share said group with multiple people (support@jobandtalent.com)
If you just want a distribution list, your google group is ready to go. But, if you want to create a collaborative inbox, you would have to activate it in the group settings:
1) Click on the "Group settings" option once inside the website of your google group (if your group is: "my.new.group@jobandtalent.com" the group's URL would be https://groups.google.com/a/jobandtalent.com/g/my.new.group)
2) Click on the "Collaborative inbox" in the options shown and then click on "save changes"
That's it!
To learn more about collaborative inboxes and what they can / cannot do, please watch this quick video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uzYQIRS0Ks
I created a collaborative inbox. How do I reply to emails in the name of the group?
You have two main options:
1. You can reply under the group name directly by opening an incoming email using the google group's link (example: https://groups.google.com/a/jobandtalent.com/g/my.new.group)
2. You can also reply under the group name directly in gmail. To do this, go to your Gmail. Then, go to settings (icon in the top right of the screen) > see al settings > Accounts > "Add another email address"
Please make sure to click on the first "add another email address". The other links are not correct
After that, simply follow the instructions described in the pop up and introduce the security code that will be sent to group. Once you have completed this, you will be able to reply to any email as your usual name, or as the group's name