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Use cases → Admin and governance

Synchronise SSO user profile data to Google Workspace

Keep Workspace user details aligned with the identity provider by updating profiles through domain-wide delegation.

Who it is forIdentity engineers and platform teams managing user lifecycle across SSO and Workspace.
APIsAdmin SDK
Typical scopesadmin.directory.user

The problem

When SSO is the source of truth, profile fields like name, department, or manager often get out of sync with Workspace. Manual correction is error-prone and doesn't scale, especially after bulk onboarding or re-orgs.

How it works

  1. Export authoritative user profile data from the SSO provider.
  2. Match SSO records to Workspace users by email or unique ID.
  3. Impersonate an admin account with the service account and update user fields via the Admin SDK.
  4. Log both successful and failed updates for audit and troubleshooting.

What changes

Workspace user profiles reflect the current SSO state, reducing confusion and ensuring correct access, group membership, and contact details.

The trap in this one. Modifying immutable fields like primary email or orgUnitPath via the Admin SDK triggers a silent partial update: other changes succeed but the problematic field is ignored without an error. This leaves user data half-updated, and unless you read back the full user object after each write, you won’t spot these silent skips.

Watch it explained

“Configure SSO with Google Workspace” — SmartDraw on YouTube. Third-party video, included because it covers this ground well. We are not affiliated with the channel.

Questions people ask

Can I update custom schema fields as well?

Yes, but you must predefine the custom schema in the Admin console or API; attempts to write to non-existent schema fields are ignored with only a warning, not an error.

What happens if the SSO user doesn't exist in Workspace?

The Admin SDK returns a 404, which you should treat as a signal to provision the account or trigger a reconciliation workflow.

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

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