Bulk show or hide users in Google Workspace

In many instances, an IT admin in an organization might need to bulk show or hide users in Google Workspace. This will prohibit the visibility of that user from the Google workspace directory. It will not let the user’s email address and other profile data appear on Google services like Gmail, Calendar, Google contacts, and Google Cloud. But remember, you should sign in to your Admin console as a super administrator to enable this feature.

In this article, you will learn to bulk show or hide a user from the directory easily with the help of Foresight.

But why do you need to show or hide a users?

The Google Workspace directory has every user’s contact information and external contacts for an organizational unit. The default setting makes the Google workspace directory turned on. Thus -

• The users can get profile details in Google Contacts and other Google services.
• Individual email addresses auto-complete as the users provide them in Gmail, or calendar. 
• The user information appears in suggestions when his email is typed into Google Cloud Search.

The IT Admin can control which users’ information will be shared in the Google Workspace directory. Suppose a user is not willing to share his profile information with your organization. Then what are the steps you can take? In that case, you should hide a user from the directory. This way you can add a layer of security to that user’s profile and stop this info from being shared in public. This action will make the following changes-

1. The user’s profile information won’t auto-complete when other users enter addresses in Gmail and Calendar.
2. The profile information won't arrive in other users' Contacts Manager.
3. Their profile information won't be visible in Cloud Search results.

Bulk show or hide users in Google Workspace with Foresight

Foresight is a SaaS platform to help businesses streamline and automate Google Workspace workflows without learning to code. It empowers administrators and users to design complex business workflows that cannot be done with native Google cloud services and work in a smarter way.

You can bulk show or hide a user from the directory by using directory API with the Admin console. So this will require a little bit of coding. But using Foresight doesn’t need any coding to perform this task. Thus it saves your time and increases productivity.

Video Demo

From this demo video, you can learn about the Bulk show or hide users by using Foresight.

Rule Creation

Here we are taking an email list of 50 users in Google Sheets. Do note that for this demonstration we have taken on 50 users, but in the real world, it can handle thousands of users at once. Download the Google sheet as CSV.

1. Log in to Foresight with the Google Admin account. Head over to the Rules page and click on the new rule button in the bottom-right corner.
2. Select the Data uploaded trigger and upload the CSV file with the updated info. Wait for the file to be parsed. Then click on Next.
3. Select the Update user directory sharing action.
4. You may need to authorize Foresight in the Google Workspace account. After a successful permission grant, you will see the Access granted status.
5. Now select the Email in the Primary email field. Then uncheck the Hide user in the directory. It will hide the user from the directory. Then click on Review.
6.  Enter the Rule name (as per your choice) and click Create.

Rule Triggering

1. You can see the rule has been created. Click on the upload icon and upload the same CSV file again. This process will take a few seconds.

Verifying Results

1. Some notifications will arrive in the top-right corner. Click on the notification icon and then click on View log. You can also visit the Logs page from the left sidebar. The logs show the rule is triggered successfully.
2. Now confirm the result from Google services – Gmail, Google Contacts, and Google Cloud Search.

Note: It may take 24 hours to activate this action.

Conclusion

Hopefully, now you understand how to bulk show or hide users in Google Workspace with Google Admin accounts using Foresight. Foresight is a handy tool that helps you to carry out this task smoothly with little effort by automating the entire process. 

So, if you are interested, start with the 14-day free trial and keep exploring its services. You can read other articles related to this topic like Bulk remove members from Google Group, Set which email address is shown in the directory, Control who users can find in the directory, and Overview: Set up and manage the Directory.