Google Workspace, in practice

What I learned running it as Super Admin from 2016 to 2025. Written for administrators doing the job, not for a certification.

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Google Workspace admin interview questions

95 questions with model answers and what each one is really testing. Open one, answer it out loud, then mark whether you had it.

Access and identity

Organisational units and groups

The structural decision everything else hangs off: OUs carry policy, groups carry access, and confusing the two bends your whole tree out of shape.

Context-Aware Access, properly

How Context-Aware Access is actually assembled, a rollout that survives real users, and the four ways it goes wrong in production.

Admin access and break-glass

How to keep super admin counts honest, why admins need separate accounts, and how to build a break-glass account that actually works when you need it.

The employee lifecycle

Joiner, mover, leaver

How to automate the identity lifecycle in Google Workspace, why ordering matters on the leaver side, and why the mover event is the one everybody skips.

PeopleHR to Google Workspace, without buying a tool

Provision Google Workspace accounts from PeopleHR with Apps Script and the Admin SDK: the reconciliation pattern, working code, and a circuit breaker.

What a leaver's account costs

Keeping departed staff's data means paying for accounts nobody uses. How to decide the retention period per person, and what it takes to actually get back into one.

Data, mail and retention

DLP without breaking the business

How a Workspace DLP rule is built, why every rollout starts in audit only, and the five failure modes that get DLP switched off.

SPF, DKIM and DMARC

What each of the three actually does, why alignment is the whole point, and how to move DMARC to reject without losing legitimate mail.

Vault is not a backup

What Google Vault actually does, why it cannot restore a shared drive to how it looked on Tuesday, and what to tell the person asking.