Google Drive

Most of what a district knows already lives in Google Drive: the student handbook, the acceptable use policy, the bell schedules, the Chromebook repair procedure. Connecting Google Drive brings those documents into the knowledge base that schoolAgent and Otto answer from, so a parent asking "What time does early release start?" gets the answer from this year's handbook, and a teacher asking "How do I request a loaner?" gets your IT team's own procedure. See Knowledge for how it sits beside the other knowledge integrations.

Three things to know before you start:

• It's read only. schoolOS reads the documents you pick and nothing else. It never creates, edits, shares, moves or deletes anything in Google Drive.
• Each person connects their own Google account, and sees only the drives and folders that account can already open. Nobody browses anyone else's Drive, and connecting doesn't widen what anyone can see.
• You choose what comes in. Nothing syncs until you tick a folder or a document, and only what you tick is read.

You need Manage integrations to connect Google Drive and choose what syncs, and Manage knowledge to open the Knowledge tab and remove documents. Your plan needs schoolAgent.

Connect#

Connect from either place:

• The Knowledge tab of Admin › Agent › Configuration: select Add knowledge source, choose Google Drive, then Connect Google Drive. This is the quickest way, because choosing what comes in happens on the same screen.
• The Google Drive page: open Admin › Account › Integrations, select Google Drive, and select Sign in with Google.

Either way, Google asks you to sign in and approve access for schoolOS. Sign in with the Google Workspace account that can open the drives you want to bring in; any staff member can connect their own account, and no Workspace admin rights are needed. Google shows what schoolOS asks for:

• See and download all your Google Drive files and See information about your Google Drive files. Read-only access to Drive. This is what lets schoolOS list your folders and read the documents you pick.
• See your primary Google Account email address and See your personal info. Only so the connection can be labeled with your name and address.

Nothing in that list allows writing, and schoolOS never asks for more. The sign-in tokens are stored encrypted and never shown again. Only the person who started the sign-in can finish it, and only for the district it was started in.

Once connected, the Google Drive page shows Connected at the top, and your account appears under Google Drive connections with a You badge. The Knowledge tab's Google Drive source shows Connected to your email.

Choose what comes in#

Open the Knowledge tab of Admin › Agent › Configuration, select Add knowledge source and choose Google Drive. Under Browse and select folders or documents, the tree starts with My Drive and every shared drive your account can open. Open a folder to see what's inside; each level is read from Google as you open it.

• Tick a folder to bring in every supported document inside it, including sub-folders. The folder is remembered, so documents added to it later come in on the next sync, and the folder shows a Syncing badge, with its document count, from then on.
• Tick a document to bring in just that one.
• A folder that's partly ticked shows a half-filled box, so you can see something inside it is syncing without the whole folder being chosen.

Select Next. On Audience, choose Who can see answers from this (see Who sees it) and How often (see What syncs, and when). Select Next again: Review repeats what's coming in, how often it syncs and who can see it ("Keeps in sync weekly", "Everyone signed in"), so nobody imports a handbook without noticing who can read it. Select Add knowledge.

The import runs in the background. The Knowledge tab shows what it's doing: "Looking through folders — 40 documents so far", then "Reading 12 of 40", then "Adding to the knowledge base…", and finally "Added 38 documents to knowledge", with a list of any documents it couldn't read and why. You can leave the page; the documents appear in the Sources list as the folders finish.

A folder or a document?#

Tick the folder when the documents change or grow: a "Handbooks 2026-27" folder that gets each school's handbook as it's finished, or a "Board Minutes" folder that gains a file every month. The folder is re-checked on your schedule, new files come in, and edited files are re-read.

Tick a single document when it's a one-off that isn't going to change, like a signed policy or a map. A single document is imported once and isn't re-checked: to pick up an edit, remove it from the Sources list and add it again.

Stop syncing a folder or remove a document#

In the Sources list on the Knowledge tab, a synced folder is one row, with its sub-folders and documents underneath. Open its ⋯ menu and select Stop syncing and delete. The folder is forgotten and every document it brought in is deleted from the knowledge base; the files in Google Drive are untouched. Select Keep syncing to back out.

To remove single documents, untick them in the Google Drive picker and select Remove, or open the document's ⋯ menu in the Sources list and select Delete. Either way you confirm first, and the file in Drive stays as it is.

The Shared drives and folders list on the Google Drive page#

The Google Drive page itself has a Shared drives and folders section: each shared drive your account can open and its top-level folders, with a box to tick and a Syncing badge on each one that's ticked. It doesn't show My Drive, deeper folders or single documents, so for anything beyond a whole top-level folder use the Knowledge tab. Once you've chosen folders in Knowledge, the schedule follows that list.

What you can't browse#

The tree shows My Drive and shared drives. A document someone shared with you directly, that isn't in a shared drive or your My Drive, doesn't appear. Ask for it to be moved into a shared drive, or have the person who owns it connect their own account.

What syncs, and when#

Every connection has a How often: bring the documents in Once, or Keep in sync hourly, daily, weekly or monthly. Set it in the Google Drive picker when you add a folder, in a document's Edit dialog on the Knowledge tab (it applies to every document from that connection, not just the one you're editing), on the connection's row under Google Drive connections, or on Google Drive in the Knowledge tab of Admin › Account › Import Data. It's the same setting in every place, and it saves as soon as you pick it.

Once, or keep in sync?#

| Option | What it does | Choose it when | | --- | --- | --- | | Once — I'll sync again when I want | A one-time import: nothing runs on its own. Sync now re-reads your folders when you ask. | The documents are finished and won't change, or you want to control exactly when the agent's answers change, like the day a new handbook is approved. | | Keep in sync: hourly | Checks for changes once an hour. | A folder people edit during the day, like an IT status page or a snow-day plan that's rewritten the morning of. | | Keep in sync: daily | Checks once a day. | Procedures and FAQs your teams edit now and then. A good default for an IT or Facilities folder. | | Keep in sync: weekly | Checks once a week. New connections start here. | Handbooks and policies that change a few times a year. | | Keep in sync: monthly | Checks once a month. | Reference material that's reviewed yearly, like a facilities map or a board policy manual. |

A frequent schedule is cheap. Each check first asks Google one question, "has anything in this Drive changed since last time?", and when the answer is no and the last run was clean, the check ends there with "No changes since the last sync": nothing is downloaded. When something has changed, every synced folder is walked, and documents whose text hasn't changed are skipped before anything else is done. Only edited and new documents are read again.

Sync now, on the Google Drive page's header and on each connection's row, skips that question and walks the folders right away. Use it after an edit you don't want to wait for.

What happens to a document at the source:

• Edited. It's read again on the next check and replaces the old text. Until then, answers come from the old version.
• Added to a synced folder, or moved into one. It comes in on the next check.
• Renamed. The new name is used on the next check.
• Deleted, trashed, moved out of a synced folder, or no longer shared with you. It leaves the knowledge base on the next sync (scheduled or Sync now), and schoolAgent stops answering from it. The sync result says how many were removed. A document you imported on its own, rather than through a folder, isn't removed this way: delete it from the Sources list (Delete in its ⋯ menu) when it shouldn't be used any more.
• A folder your account can no longer open. It's skipped, and the run is marked as partial with the folder named, like "1 folder could not be listed (HR)". While any folder can't be listed, nothing is removed: a folder schoolOS can't see might still hold everything it held, so what it brought in earlier stays until the folder can be read again or you stop syncing it.

Each walk runs in the background, so a folder of three hundred documents takes as long as it takes. There's no cap on how many files a folder can hold. Scanned PDFs, which have no text to read, are sent to text recognition in a separate pass of up to 100 per run; any left over say so in the sync result and are picked up on the next run. A run that couldn't read some documents, or couldn't list a folder, is marked as partial, and the next scheduled check walks the folders again even if nothing changed, so a file that failed to download gets another chance. schoolOS only moves its "changed since" bookmark forward after a walk that finished, so an edit made during a run that stopped partway is still picked up next time.

The connection's row under Google Drive connections shows how many folders it syncs, how many files have arrived, and when it last synced. A connection with folders but no files is the one to look at: see Troubleshooting.

For example, a district with 12 schools keeps a "Handbooks 2026-27" shared drive with one folder per school. The communications director connects her Google account, ticks the drive, picks Public (all) so families on the website can ask about it, and leaves How often at Keep in sync: weekly. When the middle school revises its cell phone policy in October, the next weekly check re-reads just that handbook; the eleven others are skipped as unchanged.

File types and limits#

| In Google Drive | What schoolOS reads | | --- | --- | | Google Docs, Google Slides | The text, exported by Google | | Google Sheets | Every sheet (tab), each under its own heading, so numbers and names stay searchable | | PDF | The text layer. A scanned PDF with no text layer is sent to text recognition | | Word (.docx), Excel (.xlsx), PowerPoint (.pptx) | The text, each Excel sheet and each slide under its own heading | | Plain text, Markdown, CSV, HTML, JSON | As is |

A shortcut is read as what it points to: a shortcut to a folder is synced like that folder, and a shortcut to a document like that document.

Everything else is skipped: images, video, audio, Google Forms, Drawings, Sites, Jamboards and zip files. A skipped file is listed in the sync result as "No readable text" and doesn't stop the rest of the folder.

• Google won't export a Google Doc, Sheet or Slides file larger than 10 MB. One that size is listed as "Too large for Google Drive to export" instead of being read; split it into smaller files to bring it in.

• Only the first 50,000 characters of each document are kept, about 20 pages of text. A longer document is cut off at that point. Split a very long handbook into chapters if the end of it matters.

• A document with fewer than 20 characters of text counts as unreadable.

• Folders are followed 10 levels deep.

• Older Office formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt) are attempted as their modern equivalents and often fail. Re-save them as .docx, .xlsx or .pptx.

Who sees it#

Google Drive's sharing settings don't carry over. A document only you can open in Drive becomes readable, through schoolAgent, by whichever audience you choose when you import it. So the audience is the decision that matters.

Who can see answers from this, on the Audience step, lists the audiences. Ticking a broader group ticks everything it covers.

Which audience should I choose?#

| Option | Who gets answers from it | Choose it when | | --- | --- | --- | | Public (all) | Everyone, including guests on your website who aren't signed in | The document is already public: the student handbook, bell schedules, board policies, the school calendar. | | Everyone signed in | Anyone with a schoolOS account: staff, students and guardians, but not website visitors | Information for your community that you'd rather not publish to the open internet, like a bus route list or a lunch menu with building details. | | Staff | Teachers, helpdesk staff and admins | Procedures, internal FAQs, the IT runbook, HR guidance. | | Students | Everyone whose school role is Student | A student tech guide, club lists, the library's borrowing rules. | | Guardians | Parents and guardians | Enrollment paperwork, pickup procedures, fee information. | | A school role, like Librarians or Bus Drivers | Only people with that school role | A procedure that one team follows, like the library's damaged-book process or the transportation radio protocol. |

The audience you pick applies to everything in that import. A folder keeps its audience on every later sync, so documents added to a staff folder next year still come in for staff. To give a folder a different audience, stop syncing it and add it again with the new one. You can change a single document's audience from its Edit dialog on the Knowledge tab; the change holds until that document is edited in Drive, when it's re-read with its folder's audience.

At answer time, schoolAgent only uses documents whose audience includes the person asking. Someone signed in as a guardian never gets an answer from a Staff document, and a guest on your website only gets answers from Public (all) documents.

For example, the Facilities team of a district connects the director's Google account and ticks the "HVAC Manuals" folder, 60 PDFs of equipment manuals and the preventive maintenance schedule, for Staff. A custodian asks schoolAgent "How often do we change the filters on the rooftop units at the high school?" and gets the answer from the schedule. A parent asking the same thing gets nothing from it.

Connections#

The Google Drive page lists every connected account under Google Drive connections, whether or not you've connected your own. Each row shows Connected to and the person's email, a You badge on yours, how many folders it syncs and files have synced, when it last synced, a How often picker, Sync now and Disconnect.

Connections are per person for a reason: each one browses and reads Drive with its owner's access. So only the person who connected an account can change which of its folders sync; everyone else sees "Only name can change which folders sync." Anyone with Manage integrations can change a connection's schedule, remove its documents or disconnect it, because those are decisions about the knowledge base rather than about someone's Google account.

A row marked Shared is a connection made before connections belonged to people. It has no owner, so anyone with Manage integrations can change its folders.

For example, in one district the IT director connects his account for the "IT Procedures" shared drive, and the superintendent's assistant connects hers for the board policy folder in her My Drive. Each sees only their own folders in the picker. Both appear under Google Drive connections, and either can run Sync now on their own row.

Disconnect#

Three places, with different reach:

• Disconnect on a row under Google Drive connections disconnects that one account. Its folders stop syncing.
• Disconnect beside Your Google account in the Google Drive page's Connection section, and Disconnect in the Google Drive picker on the Knowledge tab, disconnect every Google Drive connection in your account, not only yours.
• Disconnect from the ⋯ menu on the Google Drive row of Admin › Account › Integrations does the same. See Disconnect an integration.

You confirm first. Disconnecting stops syncing and clears the saved sign-in. Documents already in the knowledge base stay, and schoolAgent keeps answering from them, until you remove them from the Sources list. Nothing changes in Google Drive. If the same person reconnects with the same Google account, the folders they chose are remembered and syncing resumes.

Troubleshooting#

• "Google Drive not connected" or "Google Drive authorization expired — reconnect required." Google no longer accepts the saved sign-in: the password changed, the account was suspended, or access was revoked in the Google account's security settings. Connect again.
• "Only the person who connected this account can change which folders sync." You're trying to add folders to someone else's connection. Connect your own Google account and pick from it.
• "No shared drives found" on the Google Drive page. Your account can't open any shared drives in your Workspace. Documents in My Drive are still available in the Knowledge tab's picker.
• The sign-in comes back with an error in the address bar. access_denied means your Google Workspace admin blocks the app; invalid_state means the sign-in was finished by a different person or browser than started it. Start again from schoolOS.
• A folder shows "No folders selected yet" or zero files synced. Nothing in it is a supported type, or the sync hasn't run. Select Sync now and read the result: it names every document it couldn't read and why.
• "No readable text." The file is an image, a scanned PDF waiting for text recognition, or an empty document. Scans are transcribed on the same run, up to 100 per run; the rest follow on the next.
• "Too large for Google Drive to export (over 10 MB)." Google refuses to export a Doc, Sheet or Slides file that big. Split it into smaller files.
• "N folders could not be listed." Your account lost access to those folders, or Google didn't answer in time. The run is partial and nothing is removed until they can be read; share them with your account again, or stop syncing them.
• "Scanned PDF — over this run's OCR limit." More than 100 scans in one run. They're read on the next run; select Sync now to start it.
• "Sync didn't finish" or "Abandoned before it finished." The background run stopped partway, usually during a deploy. Select Sync now; documents already added stay, and unchanged ones are skipped.
• schoolAgent answers from an old version. The document was edited after the last check. Wait for the schedule or select Sync now. If the new wording is past the first 50,000 characters, it was never read.
• The folder is there in Drive, but not in the picker. It's shared with you directly rather than through a shared drive or your My Drive. Have it moved into a shared drive, or ask its owner to connect.
• "Syncing…" never ends. Refresh the page; a finished run keeps its last result on screen. If it's still running after an hour, select Sync now again: a run that has stopped moving is released and a new one starts.