Disabling Chromebooks in Google Workspace is a way to disable access control from those Chrome devices of any IT organization/student organization that have not been used for a long time. With Foresight, it becomes very easy to bulk disable Chromebooks in Google Workspace.

Foresight offers an attractive feature of doing the same. It can disable thousands and more devices at a glance. But Google Admin only does it for a small number of devices. Thus, we can give more points to Foresight in this case. 

Let's jump into the process of how Foresight makes it easy for us!

Why to bulk disable Chromebooks in Google Workspace?

Here, you are learning about bulk disable Chromebooks in Google Workspace. But why do you need this?

Suppose your chrome device, say your Chromebook, is no longer in use. Or it has become inactive because it's stolen or for any other reason. Then you need to urgently disable the chrome device so that any hacker can't access it.

Apart from these, bulk disabling Chromebook comes to a place when a mass decline for old Chrome versions is needed. Simply put, Google Chrome's 0 to 50 versions are outdated. So, they are disabled now, and Google no longer provides these versions to download.

From these points of view, it can be simplified that it's essential to disable a Chromebook to prevent it from any outdated version, unnecessary usage, unauthorized access, and security vulnerability activities.

How to disable lost or stolen Chromebooks?

The general process of disabling the devices:

  1. Sign in to the Google Admin console at https://admin.google.com.
  2. Go to ‘Devices > Chrome Devices’.
  3. Then use the filter on the top to select the fresh status of the device that you want to disable. Details are described here- Device status view in Admin console.
  4. You can disable all devices by selecting parent OU or you can disable any child OU devices. 
  5. Now, check the box next to the device/multiple devices that you want to deprovision.
  6. Click Disable from the top.
  7. Choose an option to specify whether devices automatically factory reset or not and confirm one of the actions by checking the box.
    1. Disable the lock screen to block any use of the device until it's enabled again—Users can’t sign in or use devices until you re-enable them in the Admin console.
    2. Disable with factory reset to block any use of the device and remove all data including user profiles, device policies, and enrollment data—With forced re-enrollment turned on, users can’t sign in or use devices until you re-enable them in the Admin console. If forced re-enrollment is turned off, users can use devices without re-enrolling them into your account.
  8. Then click DISABLE to confirm.

How to bulk disable thousands Chromebooks in Google Workspace with Foresight?

The main advantage of using Foresight is that it allows bulk disable thousands of Chromebooks at a time, whereas Google Admin performs this task only for a limited number of devices at a time.

Foresight uses different triggers to execute different actions according to the situation. In the demo, we will use a Manual trigger with list Chrome device action to export the devices in a CSV list. Then, we will use the Data upload trigger with Disable Chrome device action to disable these devices.

Video demo

This video demo shows you the procedure of using Foresight to bulk disable Chromebooks in Google Workspace so that you can understand it very well.

Instructions

Rule setup

Let us view an organization's classroom in Google Workspace. From the Admin console, you can see the chrome devices. Now, you can find the devices from the Grade 1 organization unit. Each of them is entitled to a Status so that you can easily identify a Provisioned device. Provisioned means these devices are allowed or authorized by the organization. Our task will be to disable these devices.

For this demo, we will be disabling 50 devices. But in a real-life scenario, the number of devices that can be disabled is intended to be in the thousands.

This process has been divided into two parts-

Part 1: Exporting Chromebooks in CSV (Comma-Separated Values) list from Grade 1 Organization unit.

Part 2: Disabling the Chromebooks via exported CSV files.

Given below is the detailed procedure:

Process for Part 1

  1. Sign in to your Foresight account using your Google Admin account.
  2. Go to the Rules page and click on the New rule button New Rule button of the bottom right corner.Rule setup
  3. Select the Manual Trigger> List chrome devices action. List Chrome Devices appears by searching with the keyword ‘device’, manually. The manual trigger starts by manually clicking the Rules card.
  4. Follow these settings in this step.
    1. Grant permission to access the Google Workspace account by Foresight.
    2. Then set up the Columns field by leaving the default columns.
    3. Select /students/Grade 1 in the Organizational unit field.
  5. Click on the REVIEW button. enter the rule name as Grade 1 Chrome devices list. Click CREATE.
  6. Now, the rule is created for the Grade 1 Chrome devices list. A rule card is created, you need to click on the play icon to trigger the rule.
  7. After that, you will see a notification on the top right corner saying the rule setup was executed successfully. Click on SHOW ALL to view all the results. Also, the results can be seen from the Logs page.
  8. Finally, the rule is triggered successfully and 50 Chrome devices have been exported to the CSV file. The CSV file download link is given in the Action history section.

 Process for Part 2 

  1. Sign in to Foresight using your Google Workspace Admin account.
  2. Go to the Rules page and click on the New rule button New Rule button of the bottom right corner.
  3. Then select the Data uploaded trigger from the New Rule page and upload the CSV file. After uploading the CSV file, you can find the columns of CSV.
  4. Then click on NEXT and select Disable Chrome device action.
  5. Grant Foresight the necessary permissions. Then select the Device ID.
  6. Click on the REVIEW button and enter the rule name as Disable Grade 1 Chromebooks. Then click on CREATE.
  7. This rule is created now and it’s time to upload the same CSV file again by clicking the upload icon.
  8. After that, you will see a notification on the top right corner saying the rule has run successfully. Click on Show all to view all the results. Also, the results can be seen from the Logs page.
  9. Finally, you can observe the status of all devices has been changed to Disabled.

Note:

Bulk disabling Chromebook takes some vital actions to be performed. They are-

  • Signs out any user from that device and takes them to the device disabled page, informing anyone that it's prohibited from further usage.
  • Once the disabled page is displayed, a user cannot sign in to the device and will stay disabled until an admin re-enables the device.
  • All the licenses associated with the device(s) have been removed.
  • Also, the device's serial number was removed from the default Provisioned view. 

If you have enjoyed reading about disabling Google Chromebooks, then also read the process of bulk archiving users on Google Workspace through Foresight for more convenience and also read Migrate All Chromebooks From One OU To Another

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