Group vs. OU Management: When to Use Each Tool for Maximum Efficiency

Google Workspace is packed full of features that can make your life — and those of your co-workers — easier. But you have to understand those features are available and how to use them in order to get any benefit from them. And when you first encounter some of what Workspace has to offer, it can be confusing figuring out what's what.

Case in point: understanding the difference between Google Groups and organizational units (OUs) and the best ways to use each of them could make even the savviest IT professional scratch their heads at first.

But once you understand the difference, they can both be valuable tools for organizing your Google Workspace more effectively. This post walks you through what Google Groups and OUs are, what they're each good for, and what effective Google Group and OU management looks like.

The Admin's Core Challenge: When to Use OUs vs Google Groups?

At a glance, the purpose of Groups and OUs are the same: they're both organizational containers for your users. So what's the difference, and how can you tell which scenarios are best for which categorization option?

Google understands that enterprise organizations (and many smaller organizations as well) have complicated structures and needs. That's why each of these organizational tools have different purposes:

• Organizational Units: OUs let you configure specific settings and policies for units of people within (or involved with) your organization.
• Google Groups: Groups give you a simple way to provide resource access to a set group of people, and easily enable communication between them.

Both of these features can help you use Workspace more efficiently as it is. But you can get even more out of both of them by using gPanel, which adds features like bulk actions, easy user movement between different Groups and OUs, and a centralized reporting view to help admins keep track of it all.

Still not clear? We'll get more into the weeds of what this all means in practice.

Organizational Units (OUs): The Policy Enforcer

Organizational units let you create a structural, hierarchical framework for your Google Workspace domain. They're a way to organize your users based on where they fall in the company's org chart and what level of settings should be applied to them.

For admins, OUs can make it easier for you to ensure each employee is held to the policies appropriate for their level.

Some of the main characteristics of how OUs work in Google Workspace are:

• Hierarchical Structure: Your business has a hierarchy; your OUs will reflect that. Users belong to the OU that corresponds with their place in the org structure, which means each user can only belong to one OU at a time. If they get promoted, moving up to a new level will remove them from the former OU.
• Policy Inheritance: The policies you apply to a parent OU will be inherited down the OU structure. Meaning that if you establish a parent OU for "Full-time Employees (FTEs)" then set up department OUs under that like "Marketing" and "Sales," your department OUs will, by default, have the same settings as the "FTE" OU. You can customize the settings for child OUs, if needed — overriding the policies they inherited. For example, you could allow everyone in the Marketing OU access to your YouTube account, while restricting access to FTEs in other departments.
• Primary Use Case: In summary, OUs are useful for enforcing Google Workspace settings, policies, and configurations for different levels of the organization. They save admins the trouble of having to configure individual settings for each department or level within the company.

How OUs Work in Practice

To give you a better idea of what you can use OUs for, here are a few examples of scenarios where they're relevant:

Application Settings

Whenever you want to make a Google Workspace application available to some users and not others, or when you want to control what level of access different users have, OUs are a good tool. 

For example, in a school setting you may want to turn off access to YouTube for your "Students" OU, while keeping it available for all users in the "Teachers" OU.

Device Management

OUs can also help with managing device policies. If you provide company laptops or tablets, you can enforce specific security policies — like requiring 2FA (two-factor authentication) — for all users in relevant OUs. You can also allow remote wipe capability for devices used by employees in specific OUs.

For example, remote workers or salespeople who travel regularly may face a higher risk of device loss or theft. Turning on the remote wipe capability for everyone in the "Sales Team" or "Remote Workers" OU can add an extra level of protection.

User Provisioning Defaults

Use OUs to set default configurations for newly provisioned accounts. For example, if your organization has a calendar sharing policy, you can make sure new hires get access to the relevant shared calendars on day one when starting their job.

Moving Users Between OUs

When a user changes positions in your company — whether due to promotion, or choosing to go from part-time to full-time or vice versa — moving them from one OU to another will instantly change all their inherited settings. That can be convenient when it's a matter of one person at a time changing positions. But it can cause difficulties when your business is undergoing a re-organization. 

For big organizational changes, gPanel makes OU management much easier. You can make bulk updates to which positions fall under each OU, and move groups of users to new units quickly and accurately. That ensures people seamlessly keep the right settings, reducing compliance and security risks, while still providing employees the tools they need to get their work done.

Groups: The Access and Communication Hub

Google Groups let you create dynamic collections of users to easily grant access to Workspace resources to everyone appropriate, and enable communication with a relevant set of people all at once. Google Groups aren't tied to your organization's structure, which gives you the flexibility to create any Group that can serve your business needs. When you use Google Groups strategically, they simplify access control, team communication, and governance.

Specifically, some of the main characteristics of how Google Groups work within Workspace are:

• Flat Structure: Groups are non-hierarchical, so you can create groups that contain users from various departments and levels within your organization. This also means Groups don't inherit settings from other groups. You'll want to establish the appropriate settings for each Group when you create it.
• Membership Flexibility: Unlike OUs, users aren't limited to one Group. They can belong to as many different Groups as are relevant to their business responsibilities and interests.
• Primary Use Case: The main two reasons to create a Google Group are to make it easy to grant access to shared Google Drives, files, and folders that are relevant to a set of people all at once, or to facilitate communication with a particular collection of people.

How Google Groups Work in Practice

To help you visualize the kinds of situations where Google Groups come into play, a few examples of how organizations use them are:

Granting Access to Resources

Groups are a great resource for easily sharing access to Google Drive folders, Shared Drives, Calendars, and other applications. For example, you could set up a Shared Drive with all the resources anyone in your org that handles social media needs — think: your style guide, a doc of best practices, and useful templates — and create a “Social Media” Group that provides access to anyone relevant. 

Your Finance department could use a Google Group to ensure that everyone on the team has access to the shared calendar of important deadlines, along with the shared Drive folder with the docs covering what to submit for each deadline.

Email Distribution

Google Groups are also a good way to manage internal mailing lists. You can create Groups to handle any communications that need to go out to a subset of Workspace users. For example, an email to employees@domain.com could go to a Group that includes all full-time employees, while one to marketing@domain.com would reach everyone in the marketing department. 

Since Groups aren't tied to specific departments, you can also use them for uses that fall outside the main org structure, like creating an events@domain.com Group list for any employees who have volunteered to help with party planning. 

In short, Groups are a useful method to ensure the right people receive information about department updates, event invites, and policy notifications.

Security Roles

Organizations with gPanel can also use Groups to set up Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), simplifying the process of assigning administrative roles and permissions. By setting permissions based on the role, rather than the individual, you save IT admins time, while also minimizing the risk of human error.

Easy Add/Remove Options

You can add and remove users from Groups without impacting their core service settings. They'll only lose access to the specific functions of that Group (e.g. no longer receiving the Group emails or having access to the specific resources associated with it). 

Within gPanel, admins can easily track the membership for each group and use bulk group membership management features to add and remove users as needed. That can help you improve org security, as only the appropriate people will consistently have access to Group resources and communications.

Leveraging gPanel for Maximum Efficiency

Any organization using Google Workspace can benefit from learning how to use Google Groups and OUs more strategically. But if you want to really level up and get even more out of Workspace's organizational tools, gPanel adds several additional features to the mix that can simplify OU and Group management for your admins:

• Bulk User Movement: If your company ever goes through a re-organization or processes a large number of promotions or position changes all at once, you don't want to be stuck updating the OU for every user individually. With gPanel, you don't have to. You can select hundreds of users at once across different filters, and move them to a new OU in a single action. That both improves efficiency and minimizes the risk of dealing with scripting errors.
• Group Auditing and Cleanup: The more Google Groups your organization has, the harder it is to keep track of them all. gPanel's reporting features offer an intuitive way to view all the members of multiple Groups in one view. That way you can quickly check to see if Groups still include any users with dormant or disabled accounts. Pair that with the bulk updating feature, and you can quickly remove all the outdated users in one step.
• Simplified Visibility: gPanel provides a centralized view for all your OUs and Groups. You can instantly see a user's OU path and Group memberships on a single screen, which is critical for troubleshooting access issues. When you have visibility into what's going on with all Groups and OUs, you'll also be better able to spot security issues that should be addressed quickly, like an outside account joining a Group that shares secure information.
• Template Cloning: Any time your organization adds new departments or subgroups, you can simplify the setup process of a new Google Group by cloning an existing one. You won't have to configure all the settings manually, if you know they should be essentially the same as those of a Group that came before.

These features amount to more efficiency and better security. And they give your admins back more time to deal with critical IT tasks.

Using the Group and OU features Google Workspace includes is a smart way to improve user management and communication at your organization. Adding gPanel's features to the mix helps you use those features more efficiently, successfully, and in a more intuitive view. To get a better look at what gPanel can do for your organization, set up a free demo.