This article is written for G Suite for Education Administrators.
Introduction
In this post, we will guide you through the process of disabling comments in Google Docs Editors. Google Docs Editors is a powerful suite of productivity tools that allows users to collaborate and share documents, spreadsheets, and presentations online. Comment is an essential feature in cloud based collaborative apps G Suite editors. It keeps people informed when someone else made edits or feedback to a document. Having that said, in schools, some smart students repurpose the comment feature as a convenient messenger.
Since Admin Console does not have an option to configure this feature, this article explains how Safe Doc chrome extension disable the comment feature. If you have yet to install Safe Doc, apply a 30 days trial.
What's changing?
Before
The comment appears in many places in Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings. Adding a comment can be done in Insert > Comment menu or the 
icon in the toolbar of any of these apps.
Students can initiate a comment, edit a comment, reply to others' comment, delete a comment or approve / reject others' comments.
At the top right of these apps, you will also find a 
comment history button. This opens up the a list of current document's past comments from anyone. Students can reply to comments in place.
Comment also appears in Google Drive file preview.
After
Safe Doc disables the Comment feature in all of these apps. Students are disallowed to post comments. Students, however, can still see comments from the teachers.
As the comment feature is everywhere, we only demonstrate most visible scenes.
The Insert > Comment menu in Docs editors is removed.
The Comment button is removed from the Docs editors.
The Comment button on the edge of a Google Document is removed.
The Comment item in the context menu is removed.
In the comment history dialog, students are not allowed to initiate new comments or reply to others' comments. That said, students still receive comments from the teacher and acknowledge them.
In previewing Google Drive files, comments are disabled as well.
How to get started
Given that you have deployed Safe Doc and learned how to configure Safe Doc, the step is to disable the comment feature is very simple. Add the following policy to your students' organizational unit (OU).
Conclusion
Disabling comments in Google Docs Editors can be a useful feature when you want to restrict collaboration or maintain document integrity. By following the simple steps outlined in this post, you can easily disable comments in your documents, spreadsheets, or presentations.
"BlockComment": {
"Value": true
}
On / off by default?
Safe Doc does not block the comment feature in editor apps if this policy is not set.
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Safe Doc
