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Google Workspace Sync Setup
Google Workspace Sync Setup

Quickly Integrate Sift with Google Workspace

Ryan Bickham avatar
Written by Ryan Bickham
Updated over 9 months ago

Learn how to synchronize Sift users and groups with your existing Google Workspace (formerly known as GSuite) domain.

Overview

Set up an automated integration to frequently synchronize Sift profiles directly from Google Workspace. The sync is a one-way operation. No information from Sift is imported into your user directory.

There are a couple of different places you can configure your Google integration in the Sift Admin Dashboard:

  1. During the initial Directory/source setup wizard when the source is first created.

  2. After you've created your source, you can update your authorization and configuration on your Source Dashboard after it's been set up.

We'll walk through the fist scenario noted above, but the second is very similar.

Prerequisites

Prerequisites necessary for Google Workspace synchronization are as follows:

  • You must be an administrator of your Google Workspace domain. If you are not an administrator, you may be able to go through Google's authorization flow, but your sync may then error.

  • Administrator access to the Sift Admin Dashboard.

  • Having created a directory in the Sift Admin Dashboard (details on how to set up a Directory can be found in this guide).

Authorizing Google Workspace

After selecting Google Workspace as a source type, you will need to click the "Authorize" button to grant Sift access to read information from your Google Workspace domain.

Clicking "Authorize" will take you to a Google authorization page. Sign in with your administrator account.

Sift does not see or store your administration credentials. Once you’ve signed in, you must click "Allow" to grant Sift the read rights needed to import your users from your Google Workspace domain.

After authenticating, you'll either be redirected back to Sift, confirming your authorization was successful, or shown an error. If you receive an error, the most likely reason is that the account signing into Google did not have sufficient permissions.

Completing the setup process

Once you've successfully authorized Google Workspace, you will go through the rest of the setup process to create your mappings and enable your sync.

Enabling and Disabling Sync

On the Source Dashboard, click the "Enable Sync" switch on the top right of the page to sync profiles from Google to your Sift instance.

Once enabled, Sift will sync with Goggle once every 60 minutes. You can also manually initialize a sync using the "Sync Now" button as long as a sync isn't already running.

Disabling Sync

If you choose to disable your Google Workspace sync, or if your sync loses authorization, your people data will remain as a reflection of the most recent successful sync. Your people data will not be deleted nor will any source settings be lost.

When you reactivate sync, or reauthorize, sync will resume, and any changes since the last sync will be reflected.

Debugging Failed Syncs

If your data sync is consistently in the failed state, trying one or more of the following may resolve your issue:

Reauthorize your source with a current Google Workspace admin

If the person who originally authorized your Google Workspace source is no longer with your organization, or is no longer an administrator, your authorization will fail on the next sync. To fix this issue, have someone in your organization who is currently a Google Workspace admin go through the authorization flow by clicking the "Reauthorize" button.

Check required data mappings

If Sift finds people from your data source who do not have all of our required mappings (Unique Identifier, first name, last name, and email), they will be ignored. If no people are found that have all of these attributes, then the sync will fail. Ensure that all people you want to be synced into Sift have a value for all of these mappings.

Contact us

If reauthorizing your source does not fix the issue, you can contact us using the "Chat" button in the admin dashboard, and we can help you debug the issue.

Additional Setup (Optional)

Syncing photos

If you would like to import photos from Google Workspace, navigate to the Source Settings tab and turn the Photo Sync setting to the "On" position.

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