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 ~groupmail sync students group ~groupemail

Invite guardians
gam csv guardians.csv gam create guardianinvite ~”Primary Email” ~Email 

where Primary Email = guardians email Email = students G Suite Account

Remove guardian
gam delete guardian guardianemail studentemail

ChromeOS

To move chromebooks to specific OU and asset tag etc

gam csv devices.csv gam update cros ~deviceid user ~email notes ~Name ou ~ou

email = users email note = users name ou = ou to pop the device into

ou syntax is like /Chrome Devices/Assigned to specific users/2014 Devices as an e.g. Put stuff in double quotes if in the actual gam command.

List all ChromeOS devices to drive

gam print cros basic todrive

Disable/enable device

gam cros deviceid action disable/reenable

This is way faster than doing this in the management console!

Groups

Bulk add users to a group

gam csv users.csv gam update group group@yourdomain.com add member ~email

Change permissions on a group

gam csv groups.csv gam update group ~groupmail who_can_post_message all_managers_can_post

So this one will read a list of groups in groups.csv - where there is a header groupmail and in that column, there are group email addresses. This will restrict them to managers and owners only posting.

Users

Bulk make users:

gam csv users.csv gam create user ~email firstname ~first lastname ~last password ~password changepassword on org “/Students/2017 Students”

So this one makes users, puts them in the specified OU and forces password change at next login.

Mail

Delete a specific message for a list of users inboxes:

gam csv mail.csv gam user ~mail delete messages query rfc822msgid:MESSAGEIDHERE doit

mail.csv contains a list of email addresses you want to target. You will need the message id - you can get this from the mail reports in the admin console or vault.

Bulk command options

The simplest way to run bulk commands it "gam csv yourfile.csv gam commandyouwanttorun ....". You reference the headers in the csv file using the "~" symbol - see e.g's above.

The other option is to use PowerShell. I find this slower - but in some cases more reliable - particularly for the gam sync commands. An example would be:

$list = Import-Csv C:\GAM\groups.csv

foreach ($entry in $list)

  {

    .\gam.exe course $($entry.group) sync students group $($entry.groupmail)

  }

This does the same as gam csv groups.csv gam course ~groupmail sync students group ~groupemail however, works more reliably for me.

One of the nice things about GAM is that you can string commands together and run them on a schedule to keep stuff up to date. It also has the advantage is that you are authorising the app to run on your machine - and it's your project - you are not giving any power to any third party. Good for privacy.