How to prepare your Google Workspace Account before you go on holiday!

Nothing is more stressful than the point just before you go on holiday, especially if you have a young family. Making sure you have everything packed, travel insurance in place and quadrupled checked you have your passports with you.

It's not until 40 or so minutes after takeoff that you can finally relax and realise, "oh bugger, I forgot to give my work colleagues access to my email".

To make it easier for you to prepare your Google Workspace account so others in your team can access the data they need while you are away, here is a list of things you should do a few days before you head out for your break away.

Gmail

Your email account may hold useful emails relating to projects your team is working on; they may need these emails while you are away. You can grant "delegated access" to your email account to the person covering for you.

Here is how you set up delegated access. With delegated access, you don't need to share your login details, and an audit log gets kept, so all actions taken in your email account by your team get recorded. On your return, you can simply revoke delegated access.

You may also want to turn on your out-of-office!

Google Drive

Google Drive, its where all your data is stored. Go through your recent Google Drive files and put them in the correct Shared Drives so your team can access these files, especially if you have "work in progress" files stored privately in your "My Drive" area.

Check the access levels on any Shared Drives you have created are appropriate and maybe elevate someone in your team to be able to adjust the sharing settings in your Shared Drives before you jet off.

Google Calendar

For events on your calendar, especially repeating events scheduled with clients, add someone in your team to the event with the ability to edit and reschedule the event while you are away. Or share your calendar with them so that they can make changes to any event.

We find it quite common for users to contact us to edit an event they don't have access to because the event needs to be moved to a new date, but they don’t have permission to make the change.

You should also create an out-of-office event, so if someone invites you to an event Calendar will automatically decline the event and reply with a custom message you have set.

Google Voice

If you use Google Voice, don’t forget to set up your do not disturb, so you don’t get pestered by phone calls, and set up call forwarding so someone else on your team can answer calls while you are away.

Pause your Google Work Profile

If your Google Workspace account is set up on your Android phone, using the Digital Wellbeing settings, you can set your work profile to get paused so you don’t get interrupted by works apps and notifications.

One More Thing - Passwords

We often get support messages from users wanting to access a service but can't as the person who usually manages the service is away, and they don't know the password. We can't help with these requests as we do not know or keep passwords and login credentials.

The best solution is to use a password manager service such as Bitwarden. You can store all your passwords securely, and when you go on holiday, you can share the passwords your team may need. It’s all very clever and saves you from responding to desperate text messages asking for passwords.

Hopefully, by following the tips above (before you go on holiday), you won't get desperate texts from the office during your holiday because your team will be able to access all the files and documents they need, leaving you to have a peaceful holiday!