Connecting Google Workspace

What each piece gives you

Gmail: read and send from the Email Inbox, and the agent's mail capabilities — search, summarize, draft, and (with approval) send.

Calendar: events in the unified calendar, real scheduling, and honest capacity.

Drive: the agent can find and read your documents. This is the one that most changes research and drafting requests, because 'find the contract and tell me the renewal date' becomes possible.

Sheets: read and write spreadsheets — and specifically, the Deal Room and Accounts sync from Module 3 runs on this connection.

Docs, Slides, Forms: read and create. Useful for the class of request that ends in a document rather than a task.

Tasks, Meet, Chat and Drive Activity: narrower, and worth connecting when you actually use them rather than by default.

Admin / Directory: organization-level directory data. This is an admin-account connection and should be treated as one.

The scope question

Each service needs its own scope, and the consent screen is where you grant them.

The failure mode worth knowing: a connection that completed successfully but was granted fewer scopes than it needed does not report itself as broken. It reports as connected, and then individual operations fail or return nothing.

The symptom is characteristic — most things work, one specific capability quietly returns empty. If a Google-backed feature is behaving as though there is no data, checking which scopes were actually granted is a much faster diagnostic than anything else.

When in doubt, disconnect and reconnect, reading the consent screen this time. It takes a minute and resolves a category of problem that is otherwise very hard to see.

Sheets and the sync features

Worth calling out separately because it is load-bearing for two features.

The Deal Room's import-and-mirror and the Accounts tab's equivalent both run on the Google Sheets connection, using the connecting account's token. That means the connected account must have access to the spreadsheet — not just any account in your organization, that specific one.

It also means that if the connection breaks, the sync stops, and a stopped sync looks exactly like a pipeline where nothing changed. The 'last successful sync' timestamp is what distinguishes them, and it is the thing to check rather than the data.

Do not connect Google twice

Some providers proxy Google on your behalf. If you connect both native Google and such a provider, you have two paths to the same account.

Kavanah handles this — calendars de-duplicate at render, mail resolves to a single backend — but the situation is still worth avoiding, because every subsequent debugging conversation has to disambiguate which path you are looking at.

Pick one. If you want the proxy for its own features, use the proxy. If you want native Google, use native. Connecting both because each was easy is how you end up with a calendar you cannot reason about.

Renewals

Google grants expire and get revoked — by policy changes, by password resets, by admin action, by time.

When that happens, the connection needs reconnecting, and until someone does, everything that depends on it silently stops. Kavanah alerts on broken connections, but the alert only helps if it reaches someone.

The habit worth having: when a Google-backed feature behaves oddly, check the connection before you check anything else. It is the single most common cause of a Kavanah feature that used to work and now does not.