Recommended Practices for Next Generation Egnyte for Google Workspace Integration

Requirement for Authorization Account

Limitations for Users with Lifetime (Personal) Workspace Accounts

File Sync

Shared Drive Creation Permissions

Administrative Control of Shared Drive Settings

Grant Access to Shared Drive

Requirement for Authorization Account

The admin should create and use a separate Workspace account, solely created to authenticate the latest Egnyte for Google Workspace integration. 

This approach helps safeguard access to stored content in case the owner of a personal account leaves the company or if credentials are lost, reducing the risk of permanent data loss. 

Limitations for Users with Lifetime (Personal) Workspace Accounts 

Users with personal, independent, or free Workspace accounts cannot use the latest version of Google integration. This is expected due to limitations associated with individual accounts. Personal accounts do not have access to the shared drive creation feature, which is exclusive to certain Google Workspace editions. 

Shared drive creation feature  is supported only in following Google Workspace editions: 

• Workspace Editions: Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise, Enterprise for Education, and Nonprofits
• Legacy G Suite Editions: Business, Education, and Enterprise

File Sync

• The existing files from Egnyte are synced to the Shared Drive when opened. 
• After switching to the new version, all existing user sessions will expire due to token expiration. Since Google Workspace may take up to 5 minutes to invoke the API calls, users could lose any unsaved changes made during this period. 

Shared Drive Creation Permissions

Not all users within the eligible editions can create shared drives. This ability depends on permissions managed by the Workspace administrator within the organization. By default, organizational users have shared drive creation rights, though administrators can restrict this to certain organizational units or groups as needed. 

For individual users with personal Workspace accounts (e.g., @gmail.com) or those on Google Workspace Basic, Business Starter, or Free editions, shared drives cannot be created, but these users can be invited to collaborate on files created by supported users. 

Administrative Control of Shared Drive Settings

The management of shared drive settings and permissions is exclusively available to Google Workspace administrators. Administrators have the authority to set policies governing shared drive access and creation within the organization. For further details, refer to the Workspace support article here. 

Grant Access to Shared Drive

Egnyte’s Google integration successfully creates the required Google Shared Drive; however, Google does not automatically grant access to other users in the same organization.  

Access to a Shared Drive must be explicitly granted, and Google allows this only for individual users or Google Groups. Other email domains cannot be added directly as members. If a domain is neither a user nor a group, Google shows an error stating that it’s not a valid user or group. 

This may lead to error in Google co-edit as well as display an Error creating permissions message. This is because the users opening the files are not yet members of the Google Shared Drive. 

Follow the steps listed below to resolve the error:  

1. Sign into Google Admin Console (admin.google.com) with the admin account 
2. Go to Directory → Groups 
3. Create a new group (e.g., all-users@domainname or egnyte-access@domainname) 
4. Add all users who need access to the Egnyte Google integration to this group. Alternatively, admins can configure the group to automatically include all users in the domain (under Group settings → Access type → All users in the domain can join) 
5. Go back to Google Drive and sign in as powerview_egnyte@domainname 
6. Navigate to Shared drives → select the Egnyte shared drive 
7. Click Manage members 
8. Add the Google Group (e.g., all-users@domainname) as a member with Contributor access 
9. Click Done