Google Desktop search across computers
Google Desktop came out with a feature some time ago called Search Across Computers. According to Google the feature permits the following:
Wow! Cool! I can search and access my files from anywhere on the planet!
How does Google do that? Glad you asked. Again, according to Google:
In the corporate environment this should be setting off bells and whistles. I don’t know about you, but I can’t afford to allow my company’s intellectual property and trade secrets to reside on Google’s servers where I have absolutely no control over them!
One concern I have is this; lets say I have an email retention policy that says all email older than 90 days is destroyed, yet some partner uses Google Desktop and his email was indexed and uploaded to Google 95 days ago. Now let’s say our firm gets sued and we get a subpoena for all email up to 93 days ago and 93 days ago said partner wrote a damning email that will sink the firm. If the email was on our mail server it would be deleted in line with our retention policy. However, its sitting on Google’s servers and opposing counsel is tricky and also subpoenas Google for whatever they have.
Ouch.
As an admin, you have a lot of options through GPO settings. Head on over to Google’s admin guide. There they have a guide on how to import their admin template into a GPO.
If you want to prevent the feature ‘search across computers’, go to Computers > Administrative Templates > Google > Google Desktop > Enterprise Integration and enable “Disallow sharing of web history and documents to user’s other computers.”
Once you enable this setting your users will see the following when they try to enable the ‘search across computers’ feature:
Notice that all options are grayed out and the only option available is “nothing.”
Now you have the option of allowing users to use Google Desktop to index the local machine but not upload your company’s intellectual property and/or trade secrets to Google servers.
