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SOP — Google Workspace: calendars, meeting notes, Drive

Why nobody could see anyone else's calendar or notes, and the configuration that fixes it. Audience: Alex (admin steps), then everyone (habits).

Admin, once

  1. Calendar visibility — admin.google.com → Apps → Google Workspace → Calendar → Sharing settings → *Internal sharing options for primary calendars* → Share all information. Each existing user also checks their own Calendar → Settings → *Share with everyone at the organisation*, since the admin default does not override a user's earlier choice.
  2. Shared Drive — create "Atlas Clients"; move every [CODE] client folder into it. Files there are owned by the organisation, not a person: notes stop being tied to whoever took them, and offboarding stops being a Drive migration.

Habits, everyone

  • Real commitments live on your primary calendar. "Find a time" and invite free/busy read primaries; a shoot on a personal side-calendar blocks nothing.
  • After every client meeting, move the Gemini notes doc into [CODE] 05_Admin/Meeting Notes in the Shared Drive. Gemini saves it to the note-taker's own Drive shared only with that event's invitees — the move is what makes it the company's.
  • Notes worth acting on go through the portal: client → Knowledge → Ingest, paste the text. They land as draft facts with citations, and conflicts with what we already believe reach the deconflict queue instead of living quietly in a doc.

How Gemini notes sharing actually works (and the test)

The notes doc is created in the note-taker's own My Drive, attached to the calendar event, and shared automatically with that event's internal invitees only. Nobody else — externals included. "I can't see her notes" almost always means "I was not on the invite", not a broken setting.

The constraint that shapes the fix: notes must never reach the client. Two facts matter:

  • Gemini sharing has an internal-only option ("invitees in your organisation") — external clients get nothing even when the whole team is invited. Clients only ever receive notes if someone picks "all invitees".
  • Notes started ad-hoc inside the call (not via the calendar checkbox) tend to end up private to whoever clicked — which is the "only the creator sees it" symptom. The default is per-user, in Calendar settings.

Fixes, in the order we actually use them:

  1. Now, the habit: move each notes doc to [CODE] 05_Admin/Meeting Notes in the Shared Drive after the call. Nothing is shared toward the client, ever; the team reads via Drive.
  2. The end state: the portal pulls notes itself via the GCP service account with domain-wide delegation, drive.readonly. Google sharing stays maximally closed — docs stay locked in each person's Drive, clients can never see anything, and the portal sweeps nightly, files notes to the right client and runs them through ingest. Nobody remembers anything.
  3. Optional, only if team names on client invites are acceptable: internal-only sharing default plus internal invitees.

Test procedure (10 min, two internal accounts — a personal @gmail counts as external and will look broken by design):

  1. A invites B to an event with Gemini notes on → meet briefly → B opens the doc from the event. Proves invitee sharing.
  2. Repeat without inviting B → B cannot open it. That is the current problem, reproduced.
  3. Move that doc into the Shared Drive → B opens it via Drive. That is the fix.

For the portal's Drive access (when the GCP service account exists)

Read-only scope (drive.readonly), by construction — the app will be structurally unable to edit or delete files, the same way its database role cannot DELETE. Existing client folders are added by pasting a link, never by crawling.