Thank you for choosing to use the General Audit Tool for Google Apps. We believe this is both the most complete and fastest Audit tool in the Google Marketplace.
When you install the tool it is available to all users.
Non-Admin users can only audit their own documents, their own sites, their own calendars and groups of which they are a member.
Admin users can audit this and more for all users.
After installing, you the administrator can completely control and restrict who uses or sees the tool. To find out how to do so look here.
Before using the tool you should also get a general idea of how it works. This will help you get the most from the Audit Tool, it is easy to use but has so many features they are not always apparent. We strongly recommend you read through the Tech Tips here.
We have so much information to present we made nearly every field, icon and result a link to more information. Don’t be afraid to ‘click’ on every result and line to see what more information lies beneath.
When you as an Administrator first run the Audit Tool, we create a unique encryption key for all the metadata in your domain. This is stored in the GAT folder in your Account. It is called _GAT_ORG_TOKENS_. To make the tool run faster, using Google file share, share this key file with other Admins at your Domain. This means when any Admin runs an Audit, it updates for the other Admins also.
An important point to remember is that Google restrict the size of spreadsheets in your account to 400,000 cells. For very big companies you may need to narrow the date range to download CSV output for some reports. Where the report exceeds 400,000 cells we create multiple incrementally numbered spreadsheets.
We operate an automatic policy of ‘right to be forgotten’. This means that if you do not use the audit tool for 30 days, your metadata file will be automatically deleted. If your metadata file is deleted you will lose a lot of useful information, such as the ‘deleted’ file history (a history of files removed from trash) and much of the file read history. If you wish to preserve the the metadata file and protect this useful information you should run a scan at least once every 30 days. The easiest way to do this is to schedule a docs report of some type every day, week or at least once every 30 days.
Finally, while this is a free tool, it is a very serious piece of code and we are building a serious project. Right now we are really trying to understand customers needs and customer loads. We are not spending any money on marketing or sales, but we are very happy to offer help and support and of course we are always looking for your feedback, to contact us on any issue just drop us an email at support@generalaudittool.com
