Google Groups
Google Groups makes it easy to communicate and collaborate with groups of people, such as project teams and departments. Groups are like mailing lists as they contain the email addresses of its members, but each group has its own unique address.
You can use groups to share Google Calendars, Drive folders, Documents, Sheets and Sites. When someone joins your team or project, you can add them to the group and give them the same access as everyone else.
Key features
- Email, send calendar invites, and share content with all group members using the group email address.
- My Groups: lists all the groups you belong to and allows you to manage your own group memberships
- Groups Directory: lists all the groups at the University. Use the directory to view information about groups and also join new groups (requests to join new groups may need to be approved by an administrator).
- Discussion archives: records all the communications between group members. Post new messages and read and reply to group messages.
- Collaborative inbox: configure a group to behave like a ticketing system, letting members assign messages for themselves or for someone else to pick up.
Additional information
Configuring who can participate in your group
Google Groups has lots of settings. You can easily create different kinds of groups such as:
- distribution list: only the owners can create and send the emails
- project group: all members can create messages and reply
- restricted access: members are controlled by the owner or people can ask to join
- moderated or unmoderated.
Adding members to your group
- You can Direct Add around 200 University of York members per day. This quota goes up in time.
- When adding members in bulk, the email addresses have to be valid. If an email address doesn't exist, the attempt will fail and no members will be added.
- You can add external members – they need to accept an invite to gain access. For guidance, see allow external members (support.google.com).
Google Groups vs Google Contacts
Google Groups is different from Google Contacts.
- A Group has its own email address, which will be shared in the Groups directory allowing others to send messages to it.
- Your Contact groups are for your personal use, to send emails and meeting invitations to a list of contacts. Contact groups don't have their own email address, so no one else can send messages to them.
For more information see Google Contacts.