domainwidedelegation.comStart free

Use cases → Admin and governance

Synchronise Workspace group membership from your HR system

Keep Workspace groups aligned with source-of-truth HR data by updating memberships through a delegated service account.

Who it is forIT teams automating account lifecycle management across multiple user directories.
APIsAdmin SDK
Typical scopesadmin.directory.group, admin.directory.group.member

The problem

Manual group management drifts quickly, leading to ex-employees retaining access or new starters missing permissions. HR systems often act as the authoritative source, but syncing them with Workspace groups is fiddly and error-prone without automation.

How it works

  1. Extract current group membership from Workspace using the Admin SDK.
  2. Query the HR system for the intended membership state.
  3. Compute additions and removals by comparing the two sets.
  4. Apply changes via the Admin SDK, removing users not present in HR and adding new ones.
  5. Log all actions and handle API rate limits and transient failures.

What changes

Workspace groups reliably reflect HR-driven access, reducing manual errors and stale permissions.

The trap in this one. Removing and re-adding the same user in a tight loop can silently fail due to directory backend propagation delays: the Admin SDK may report 'not a member' immediately after removal, but a subsequent add call returns a 409 conflict for several minutes. This isn't documented and can leave intended members missing from groups until the next sync run.

Questions people ask

How often should synchronisation run?

Most organisations run this hourly or daily. More frequent runs can increase API throttling and hit propagation issues more often.

Can I use batch requests to speed up changes?

Batching is supported, but error handling gets complex — especially with partial failures caused by propagation delays. Always log individual outcomes.

Want this built?

This is a pattern we run in production. We will set up the delegation and build this on top of it — $500 per hour, most of it working the same day.

Talk to us Or read the setup guide

Related use cases

Audit which third-party apps can read your mail

List every OAuth grant across the domain and find the retired tools still holding access.

Automate joiners, movers and leavers

Create accounts, set group membership, provision Drive and hand over mailboxes without a manual checklist.

Continuously verify your delegation still works

A scheduled probe that proves every API still answers under every tenant, before a customer finds out otherwise.