Exit stage left

This is the time of year to start thinking about Data Liberation! That's right data liberation. 

If you've been fretting about what graduating seniors or students who are moving are going to do with all of the stuff they have collected and created in their organizational Google accounts -- relax! Google makes it very easy to pack your bags and leave.

*Photo credit:

Copyright (c) 123RF Stock Photos

Be no evil

The Google Data Liberation Front is an engineering team that designed ways for users to remove their data from a variety of Google services. Google's CEO was mostly concerned about being big without being evil and wanted to provide users with an easy exit strategy.

Google Takeout

Takeout is a platform that lets a user remove data from multiple Google products all at once. This is Data Liberation in it's simplest form. Below is a list of products currently available for takeout.

• +1’d sites
• Buzz
• Contacts and Circles
• Docs
• Google+ Profile
• Google+ Stream
• Picasa Web Albums
• Voice

What about all the other stuff?

While not all products are completely liberated, Google is about 2/3 of the way through  creating exit strategies for their services. Some of the big ticket items in schools are Blogs, Chrome Bookmarks, Gmail, Maps, Picasa Web Albums, Sites and more. For a complete list of all items that can be removed from Google and how to do it visit the DLF at http://www.dataliberation.org.

Other ways to move Documents

If your organization has adopted Google Apps it is easy to transfer ownership of documents to other users within the organization. (At this time document ownership cannot be transferred to a Google account outside the organization) If, for example, a student is editor-in-chief  of the school newspaper (s)he can transfer ownership of files to another student. Sharing a file is not enough because if the file owner's account is deleted, that file will disappear from the share-ee's account. Remember that documents can have only one owner.

What to do:

1. Go to the Share settings for that item and add a new user. Click Share and save.
2. Then change  from “Can Edit” to “Is Owner” and that person is the new owner:

Moving MORE Documents, like all of them

A Google Apps administrator can transfer all of a user's documents to another user.  This is done from the "Advanced Tools" tab in the Google Apps control panel. See Google’s help article for more details: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=1247799

Sites and Blogs

Follow these steps to move admin privileges from one blog account to another: http://support.google.com/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=41448

Changing owners of a Google Site is very easy. For example, a student is president of the school's Lego Club and no longer wants to be the site's webmaster. Go to the share settings for the site. Add another user and select "Is owner". Another  nifty thing about Google Sites is that a site can have multiple owners.