Google Workspace is a collection of cloud computing, productivity and collaboration tools, software and products developed and marketed by Google. It was first launched in 2006 as Google Apps for Your Domain and rebranded as G Suite in 2016, then rebranded again in 2020 as Google Workspace.

Authenticating

Google Workspaces uses OAuth, a developer-friendly delegated access protocol. Quolum has already connected the necessary wires with Google Workspaces. Using a sequence of click-throughs, your organization's administrator allows Quolum to make API calls to Google Workspaces without getting access to passwords.

Step 1: Initiate a connection to Google

Click the Connect button from the Connections card. If you are not an admin, you can invite your organization's Google Workspaces admin to make a connection to your Google Workspaces organization account. When you click on the Connect button, the web browser will navigate to the Google login page.

Step 2: Log in to Google

Log in to Google using your organization's credentials. The exact login mechanism may depend on your Google plan, and the sign-in mechanism used. You may have corporate SSO such as Azure AD, GSuite, or Okta along with multi-factor authentication. Once you have successfully logged-in, Google is going to ask you to grant access to Quolum.

Step 3: Provide consent to Quolum

The next screen after login into Google is the consent screen. On this screen, Google confirms whether you authorize Quolum to access your organization's data.

Step 4: Back to Quolum

Once you have granted access to Quolum on Google Workspaces's website, Google is going to send you back to Quolum's page in Step 1, where you started. The Connect button on the Connections card would now say Reconnect. Reconnect is used to reauthenticate under circumstances where the access has expired.

Under the hood

Using the OAuth protocol, Quolum now has delegated access to your Google Workspace. The Quolum server, running on Amazon AWS VPC, will be able to make API calls and retrieve feature-level utilization. Later, this data is crunched and available for visualization on the Quolum dashboard.