Greetings everyone, I hope your 2025 academic year is going well, particularly where RM Unify user and group provisioning is shouldering the bulk of the work in creating those accounts, updating memberships, and off-boarding where necessary, keeping you compliant with your establishment's GDPR responsibilities.
Looking forever forward at new and better ways to take more of that burden away from your IT team we are beyond delighted to be able to announce the release of Google Groups provisioning for RM Unify.
What's that?
RM Unify Group Sync can already provision your Microsoft 365 Groups and Classes (for use with Teams), as well as your Google Classes, but now with Google Groups we have the keystone in place to fully support that RM Unify bridge between your MIS and your Google organisation. Ask your RM Unify admin to enable it here, it takes 5 seconds 🚀
So, what are Google Groups?
If you're a Microsoft user then you'll be familiar with Microsoft 365 groups, used for emailing the members, sharing links to resources, and for starting and hosting class discussions on whatever topics are required. Google Groups are the same.
Can they help me in any other ways?
Oh yes. As a Google super admin, via the Google Admin centre, you will be able to convert a Google Group into a mail-enabled security group. This allows you to use the group to set permissions on resources, for example those held in shared Google Drives. You can then confidently set permissions on those files, and provide access to users using your chosen Google Group, safe in the knowledge that your group membership, from your MIS and via RM Unify, will always be up to date and accurate.
Cool! Anything else?
Yep 😊 As a Google super admin you can use these MIS-synced Google Groups as the basis for dynamic Google groups, giving greater flexibility for file and resource access. You will need to be using Google Education Plus to take advantage of Google's dynamic groups feature though, so you may need to speak with your RM Sales representative regarding licensing.
I like the 'bridge' metaphor, what else will you be building?
I'm glad! For future releases we're looking at providing flexibility to manually create groups, in Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace via RM Unify, that can sit outside of your MIS, and which can be used to fine tune your requirements for things like collaboration, access to files and resources, and communication. Particularly useful where some users may not be in your MIS directly.
This work will also pave the way for what we're calling Pastoral Groups, the ability to create an on-demand group for a student that has a membership based on that student's tutors. These can be used to quickly and easily contact a student's tutors to keep them informed about safeguarding, behavioural, or pastoral care issues for the chosen student.
But even before that and looking forward to the RM Unify release after Google Groups, we will be bringing enhanced Staff Roles functionality for Arbor customers (other MISs to follow). This will give you the option to sync additional staff roles, beyond Teaching and Non-Teaching, from the MIS into RM Unify and then on to your selected attribute in Microsoft 365 and Google, to help with the fine-tuned and granular user-based configurations you have been requesting. And lastly…. Assignment Summaries for Parents/Guardians. More information on all this to come in our next update 👀
Phew, that’s a lot!
I know right?! In the meantime you can find out more about Google Groups in our help article and, please, if you have feedback about this release, any other release, or have a cool idea about how RM Unify can solve a particular problem for your school, don't forget you can use our Ideas link from the RM Unify Help page to send it to us. We promise to read every suggestion, our commitment to you.
Until next time, Jason.