‘Grab and Go’ Simplifies Google Device Management for Businesses

Google has a plan to help companies keep their employees productive in the event of a hardware failure. The ‘Grab and Go’ Google device management program is a set of tools that can be a turnkey solution for implementing a loaner library of Google Chromebooks for your organization.

We have all been there when a device has died at work right in the middle of an important project or other work. It stops you in your tracks as you call IT for support and file a trouble ticket to begin the troubleshooting, repair or replacement process. Depending on your organization, this can set you back hours, days or weeks while you wait for the hardware issue to be resolved.

Now imagine that in each building or department, there is a rack of charged, provisioned and ready to go Chromebooks running Chrome Enterprise. When an employee hits a hardware issue that grinds their work to a stop, they just head to this rack of devices where they grab one and go back to their desk with it. Once they start the device up and log in with their credentials an automatic system assigns that device to the user for IT tracking purposes.

This Google device management process works because everything is in the cloud when your organization is using Chromebooks. That means once the end user has logged into the device, all their content is right there.

This includes items like:

Once the employee’s own device is up and operational, the loaner Chromebook is returned to the rack and ready for the next user. No need to reset the device each time because all user profiles are encrypted to protect that data.

The Google device management kit has everything you need to get up and running with a system that has been tried and tested by Google themselves. They have deployed ‘Grab and Go’ to offices around the world with 30,000 unique users and more than 100,000 loans in the last 12 months.

Google also mentions that this program is a great way to provide frontline workers, shift workers and remote workers with devices. See the companies white paper (PDF, 12 pages, 1.43MB) on the process which contains links to all the base tools to start your own ‘Grab and Go’ service using the Google device management program.

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