Sign in to your WWU Google Workspace Account

Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) accounts are optional tools offered for academic use that enable access to Google Drive, Docs, and other applications. Your Google Workspace account does not replace Outlook email, contacts, calendaring or OneDrive, but instead provides additional tools that may be helpful for personal productivity and instruction. Carefully consider whether your needs are better served by our fully-supported suite of tools provided by Microsoft.

  • Please note that while ITS will make our best effort to provide support, we have no enterprise support agreement with Google. File recovery support is particularly limited.
  • Google Workspace is not recommended for files that have HIPAA, FERPA, or Personally Identifiable Information (PII) because the university does not have an agreement in place with Google regarding sensitive data. Storage of such files would be in violation of the University's compliance with these standards.
  • Not recommended for storing files that belong to a department or group. Microsoft Teams, Office 365 Groups, and SharePoint are the fully supported shared storage locations in the cloud.

Sign In Instructions

You can sign-in to your Google Workspace account by browsing to www.google.com. 

  1. Click the Sign In button in the upper right corner.​​ If you are already signed in, click your Avatar in the upper right corner and choose Add Account
  2. Enter your username@wwu.edu (even if your primary email address includes your first and last name) and click NEXT
  3. If you see a prompt that says there are two existing Google Accounts for you, choose Organization Google Apps Account. If you receive an error that your account was not found please contact the ATUS Help Desk to have your Google Workspace account provisioned.
  4. You should be redirected to a Microsoft Office 365 login page (even though you are trying to access a Google account, you are accessing it with your WWU Office 365 credentials)
  5. Enter username@wwu.edu and your universal password. Then click the Sign in button.

If you receive an error stating your google Workspace account was not found or has been disabled, please reach out to the ATUS Help Desk. Western ran into a user capacity limitation in Google Workspace (currently a free service from Google) and halted automatic provisioning of licenses for all new accounts. If you require a Google Workspace account for a class, you may request one be created by contacting the ATUS Help Desk.

We urge students, faculty, and staff to use Microsoft OneDrive whenever possible as opposed to storing data in Google Drive. We are able to secure the data contained in the cloud within OneDrive much more effectively due to our agreement with Microsoft.

FAQs

All WWU students, faculty, and staff who had accessed their Google Workspace accounts prior to February 2022 have access. If you believe you had access before this date but can no longer login, contact the Help Desk. Western ran into a user capacity limitation in Google Workspace and some unused accounts were deactivated. We also halted automatic provisioning of licenses so that we would be able to give licenses to those who needed them without issue.

If you receive an error that your account was not found, contact the Help Desk so that it can be provisioned.

For Faculty: If your class needs to use Google Workspace for collaboration with another university or for services that are not available in M365, reach out to the Help Desk with your course name, number, and CRN. EG: BIO101-CRN##.

Google logins using the firstname.lastname@wwu.edu address will not change from being a personal account. These accounts will remain separate personal accounts unmanaged by WWU. If you decide to keep this separate account, you may wish to use both by Switching between multiple Google accounts.


 

There are some applications that will not work while signed in to your Google Workspace WWU account. These include, but are not limited to:

  • Gmail
  • The Chrome Store/Extension store
  • Maps
  • Calendar
  • Classroom
  • NotebookLM

If you want to use these services, you’ll need to open them in a different browser, use an incognito window, or sign out of your WWU Google Workspace account and into a personal Gmail account. You can also remain signed into your WWU GW account as a Chrome profile, but add your personal account to be able to switch between them for application access.

NotebookLM is disabled by default and under review by ITS for whether or not it will be approved for academic use. Please contact the Help Desk if you intend to leverage it in a class.

A Google account is needed to have your own YouTube account (but not to view content). It is not necessary to use Gmail with a YouTube account, so if keeping professional YouTube content separate from personal YouTube content is needed, a Google Workspace account can be used with WWU email/login. Note that, for academic video, WWU promotes the use of the ad-free, full-featured, secure environment of our Panopto Video Management System.

No, we do not create shared accounts in Google Workspace because they require an individual to manage a password and share it with colleagues, rather than using your own information to sign into an account as you do with a Microsoft shared mailbox. If your group would like a virtual space for collaboration, consider creating an Office 365 Group or a Team. 

Please keep in mind that when you share something out of a personal GW account, the people you share it with will lose access to the content when you leave the university. Files that need to remain with a department or group should be stored in a shared location like an Office 365 Group or a SharePoint site.

Western not having a sensitive data agreement with Google refers to data that falls under FERPA and HIPPA protections, or other confidential categories. Your account is protected by our Universal Password policy and Google Workspace for Education's privacy policy. Google Workspace does not have MFA enforced on it.

Google Workspace accessibility considerations, information for content creators, information for content consumers, alternatives/workarounds, and more can be found on the Google Apps Accessibility page.

Additional Resources

For limitations and disadvantages for academic use, see File Storage, File Sharing, and Backups.

Helpful links

 

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