Google Group Naming Conventions

Overview

The University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA) has adopted the following naming conventions for Google Groups. Other services may employ different conventions.

Important
Google Groups are typically not be created for academic classes. Course instructors should use the UAA Learning Management System (LMS) (aka Blackboard Learn) to communicate course related information to their students.

In this article:

General Requirements

All new groups must conform to the following standards:

  • The "local part" (the text before the "@" symbol) must not be longer than 64 characters.
  • The characters used are limited to the characters in the Roman alphabet (i.e. a-z, A-Z) without diacritic's (aka accent) (e.g. å, é, ê, etc.), and Arabic numerals (i.e. 0-9).
  • Words must be separated with a hyphen ( - ) (aka hyphen-minus) character (e.g. uaa-web-board).
  • Abbreviations and/or acronyms should be avoided, although commonly used ones may be used (e.g. CAS, CBPP, CoENG, CTC, UAA, etc.)
  • Group names should be representative of the list's general purpose (e.g. mac-users-group), or audience (e.g. uaa-web-board).
  • Group names should be unique, and not be confused with similar resources across the UA system.
    For Example:
    • "Library-Staff" is generic and could represent any one of the various campus libraries throughout the UA system. This should instead be either campus specific (e.g. "uaa-apu-consortium-library-staff", "krc-library-staff", etc.), or system generic (e.g. "ua-system-library-staff").

Group Name Examples

Good Examples

The following are examples of some group names which meet the recommended naming conventions.

  • uaa-cas-alumni
  • uaa-biology-faculty
  • uaa-sustainability
  • koc-faculty
  • pwsc-students

Bad Examples

The following are examples of some group names which do not meet the recommended naming conventions.

  • Biology-Faculty
  • Bfin-users
  • DAC

Need additional help or have issues

For support, requests may be submitted anytime using the appropriate Google Workspace @ UA form. Requests generate a Ticket which will be worked in order received and urgency by IT Employees with the knowledge and permissions to assist with the request.

For immediate assistance please review the Contact Us page for the appropriate support group.

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