GCPW & Google Drive Client

[Dael Sutton]

Good morning, everyone.

We've had a bit of a play with GCPW (Google Credential Provider for Windows) which allows a user to log into a Windows workstation with their Google credentials. This works quite well, and Chrome is automatically signed into the user's Google account as part of the login process.

My question to you all is this - has anyone managed to coerce the Google Drive client for Windows to get itself automatically logged in as well?

The couple of attempts I've had in the past have failed, and before I have another go, I thought I'd ask the Hive Mind(tm) so as to not reinvent a wheel.

Thoughts and opinions welcome.

Regards,

D.

Dael Sutton
Assistant Network Manager

03 358 8383

Greers Road, Burnside
PO Box 29677 Christchurch 8440
New Zealand

www.burnside.school.nz

[lfr...@jameshargest.school.nz]

Hi Dael

We use these things at JHC, for google drive client it allows "log in with browser" so if the ordering is right it is all pretty seamless

Open chrome, confirm sign in then open drive and the user has to click their name when the chrome drive login window pops up. The main benifit is the user only has to enter their crednetials just once, but do have a few clicks to get everything setup. Once this is done, per user, per machine when they log in again next time this is all cached within their profile. 

I think my main annoyance with Drive was desktop shortcuts to the software. Google drive, every time it updates, puts itself into a new folder based on the version number eg C:\Program Files\Google\Drive File Stream\113.0.1.0

I got around this issue by creating an EXE which will perform a search for the Google drive exe and then lauch it. This has worked well for a number of years

Actually while I think about it there is another really annoying issue with Google Drive client when it updates, it will not automatically re-launch. I get frequent tickets logged from users where they say their google drive (G) has "disapperared". All they need to do is launch google drive again to resolve the issue but if you're reading this Google, please imporove on this. I've passed on this comment to Google but sadly this behaviour persists. 

[Tim Porter]

Hi Team,

I have been using GCPW at Te Aratai Technology Centre for student logins. I find there are several issues with the Drive for Desktop app.

1. If you are using the laptops in a shared environment, each time a student logs on to a different device they need to go through the Google Drive setup/logon process again. This is extremely time consuming, especially for students who are used to chromebooks and how seamless that all is.
2. If you create a Google Shared drive that you would like students to put work into but not be able to delete or move things, (this is called 'contributor' permissions in Google) when students try to add files to the shared drive in the Windows explorer interface it will give them a file permissions error.

Regards,

 

TIM PORTER

Fusion Networks Ltd.

SYSTEMS ENGINEER

M 022 618 8605

 

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From: 'lfr...@jameshargest.school.nz' via Techies for schools <techies-f...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Friday, 5 September 2025 13:57
To: Techies for schools <techies-f...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [techies-for-schools] Re: GCPW & Google Drive Client

 

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