Skip to main content

Enabling Smart Unlock on Chromebooks for Google Apps users

You can now enable Smart Unlock for you Google Apps users in the management console. This feature is off by default and you will need to enable it if you want them to have the facility.

The policy to enable is shown below:

Once this is set a user can enter settings on the Chromebook and enable the feature (in advanced settings):

Before you click on enable, make sure bluetooth is turned on on the Chromebook and the phone. In addition make sure bluetooth settings are open on the phone to make it discoverable. 

Just follow the onscreen instructions to configure. Once done, if the phone is unlocked, you can unlock the Chromebook by pressing enter - no password required. 

At the moment it seems to work on the latest beta (ChromeOS 40) and android 5. Not tried with other devices yet. Update: also works on ChromeOS 39 - so now any ChromeOS device I login to picks this setting up and turns it on automatically - so working on my Chromebox on Stable 39 in my classroom.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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 grou...

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...

How to beat ChromeOS EOL and carry on getting updates

ChromeOS devices are great in loads of ways, but they have built-in obsolescence. Google will stop providing updates at a predetermined time according to the schedule you can find here . So the best you will achieve is 6.5 year if you buy the device on the launch day . In reality, it will be generally much less. It's something to watch as a good deal might not be such a good deal if the device only has two years left. Once a device reaches its "due" date, you get a red pop up telling you its time to update every time you log in. The update section tells you there are no more updates. Now the device will work fine - for a while. You might get another 6 months use out of it before core services like Gmail stop working. However, if you are prepared to do a little work, you can install the OS of your choice onto the device and carry on using the device and not accept this. If you want ChromeOS, then you can install Cloudready from Neverware. I'll outline the basic steps...