Connections
Linking your Google or Microsoft account, and the one choice you cannot change afterwards.
Connecting an account is what lets Asteria work with your mail, calendar and files. Without it, it can only see what you attach or put in a collection.
Connecting
Connect Google or Connect Microsoft. If neither appears, your organisation has not set up connectors yet and only an administrator can change that.
You then choose what Asteria may reach, service by service: Calendar, Drive, Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drive uploads.
Pick everything you expect to need, now. You can only change this selection by disconnecting and reconnecting later.
The screen says so, and it is worth taking seriously: coming back to add Calendar in three weeks means going through the whole consent flow again.
Two things about that list are not obvious and are Google's doing rather than ours:
Docs, Sheets, Slides and Drive uploads share one permission. Enabling any one enables all four. There is no way to grant Docs without Sheets.
Editing a document requires access to your Drive files generally. Google only grants document comments together with full file access, so those permissions are broader than the labels suggest. Read the hint under each service before agreeing.
What each service allows
| Service | Asteria can |
|---|---|
| Calendar | Read your events, and create, change or cancel them with your confirmation |
| Gmail | Read and search your mail, and draft, send or file messages with your confirmation |
| Drive | Search and read your files, including Docs, Sheets and Slides |
| Docs, Sheets, Slides | Read and edit them, including comments |
| Drive uploads | Put files it produces into your Drive folders, asking before every upload |
"With your confirmation" is the important phrase: in a conversation, anything that sends or changes something asks first. In a workflow, nobody is there to ask, which is why a workflow acts on the saved definition alone.
Managing a connection
Rename it, useful if you connect more than one account.
Use by default marks which one Asteria reaches for when you have several.
Grant more access where a connection is missing a service you now need. This reconnects.
Disconnect stops Asteria using the account. Anything it already produced stays where it is.
Statuses
| Status | Means |
|---|---|
| Connected | Working |
| Temporarily unavailable | A passing problem at the provider. Try again shortly |
| Needs reconnecting | The permission expired or was withdrawn. Reconnect |
| Blocked by your organisation | An administrator has to allow it. You cannot fix this |
| Disconnected | Not connected |
Not included in this connection lists services you did not grant. That is your reminder of what you skipped, and the prompt to Grant more access if a request keeps failing.
When Asteria says it cannot reach something
If your organisation has enabled a connector but you have not linked your account, Asteria stops and tells you to connect it here rather than quietly doing the job a different way. That is deliberate: silently writing a file somewhere other than where you asked would be worse than an error.
Who owns what Asteria creates
A file created with your connected account belongs to you in that system, not to your organisation.
If you leave, it goes with your account, unless it lives on a shared drive. For anything a team depends on, point Asteria at a shared drive folder rather than your personal space, and ask your administrator if you are unsure which is which.