One of the features most popular in our upgrade to the Attachments module late last year was the ability to link files from Google Drive into your Accelo Projects, Sales, Issues and more. Unfortunately, in the last week Google has made changes to their APIs which have broken our integration. We're currently waiting on advice from Google on the best way to fit in with their new requirements.
For a number of years, Google has provided an API known as the Picker as a way for third-party applications to connect to files in Google Docs, YouTube, Picasa and more. This API is perfect for situations like ours - where a user wants to find a file that is in Drive, and grab a link to that file and save it somewhere else.
Until last week, when you used the "Link from Google Drive" option in Accelo, you would be shown a pop-up dialog that allowed you to browse through the files in your Google Drive without needing to give any access to the Accelo servers - all of the browsing and selecting was happening in your browser, directly with Google, and when you found the file you wanted and clicked on "Select" Google would pass us a couple of details (like the link to the file, its type, and the title) so we could save the link on our end.
This worked perfectly, however, Google has decided that they want to make things more complicated for users with a separate authentication and approval step. Using the newer OAuth2 standard, this new requirement was slated to be enforced from April the 15th; this was going to require a bit of engineering on our end (even though we're perfectly happy with the less arduous approach), but at least we had a couple of months.
Unfortunately, though, for reasons that Google hasn't disclosed, they bought forward the change requiring the new OAuth mechanism from April 15th 2014 to Feb 21st 2014. This has had the effect of breaking the Picker for all of our users.
While Google's decision to force OAuth 2 shouldn't be a big problem (we use OAuth 2 in other places with our different Google integrations), their method of implementing it is causing us a lot of problems. Google require us to declare the specific URLs that a user might be coming "from" when they're trigging the new Picker, and they DO NOT allow the use of wildcards. Because when you're using Accelo you're using an address like yourbusiness.accelo.com, Google won't allow us to run the Picker unless we declare every single URL (with the yourbusiness prefix) in their configuration system, something that isn't possible or practicle unfortunately.
This means we're currently unable to upgrade the Google Picker code to use the new version that Google has forced on everyone two months early.
We've reached out to Google to ask for their help in getting either an exception declared for their wildcard rule or direction on the appropriate strategy. If we don't get a satisfactory answer, we're going to have to re-tool the Picker integration so that it uses a different security model and API; this will mean the only people who can load in Google Drive files will be people who've already connected their Accelo account to Google via the integrations pane. We sincerely hope this isn't the result; either way though we're expecting this problem to take a number of weeks to get to the bottom of and resolve.
Unforunately, until this issue is solved, the "Link to Google Drive" has been removed from Accelo. We apologize for any inconvenience.
