How to Populate Students GAFE Profile Photos using GAM

With a couple of free tools you can populate your students profile photos automatically. Below is a guide on how to do this if you are running with Capita SIMS as an MIS as many UK schools do.

To do this, you will first have to setup GAM - Google Apps Management Tool. A fantastic guide on how to do this can be found here. You can download GAM here.

To extract the photos from SIMS.net you will need the photoextractor utililiy which can be found here. To use this you need access to your SIMS server - might be an issue if you don't locally host it... update - actually I think you can run it on any workstation with SIMS.net installed.

It looks a bit complicated - but once you have done it a couple of times it does not take long. You can do essentially the same thing for staff photos as well. We use Teacher Dashboard and the forthcoming version has the students profile picture on the homescreen for each class - so having real pictures will be rather helpful for staff.

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Delete a specific email using GAM

If a user send an inappropriate email to a loads of people or get stung by some sort of email exploit you can quickly delete the email from all of the recipients using a GAM command. Step 1 - get the email header Go into Google Vault and search for the offending user or someone known to have got the message. Click show details and grab the email ID. This will be a long string of characters followed by @mail.gmail.com Step 2 - find out who has the email Go into Google Vault and find the original message sent by the offending user. Look at the details to see who got it. Copy the list and dump it into a spreadsheet. Clean up to just a list of emails with a column header 'mail'. Save as a csv file. Step 3 - delete messages with GAM Put your CSV file in your GAM folder - this e.g. assumes its called mail.csv Run: gam csv mail.csv gam user ~mail delete messages query rfc822msgid: MESSAGEIDHERE doit The alternative nuke option is: gam all users delete messages query rf

Adding subdomains to G Suite

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My favorite GAM commands - well a few of them at least!

Where would be without GAM? Paying for expensive syncing tools or doing tedious manual tasks in the admin console. GAM can automate most things you might want to do in G Suite. So these are a few of my favourite commands - one I use either as part of a batch file - or just standalone. There are loads more - but these are ones that are used daily. Classroom Create a spreadsheet of all your domains classes - gam print courses todrive Create a spreadsheet of a teacher's classes: gam print courses teacher fred@mydomain.com todrive Bulk create classes: gam csv classes.csv gam create course alias ~alias name ~alias section ~subject teacher ~teacher status ACTIVE where classes.csv is a list of classes you want to make. Add teachers: gam csv teachers.csv gam course ~alias add teacher ~teacher Add students: gam csv students.csv gam course ~alias add teacher ~student Sync Students (in this example to a group - but could be an ou/csv file) gam csv groups.csv gam course ~g

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