How to generate account-specific login URLs, especially for new accounts

[taft]

We're in the process of adding a group of new accounts, and I'm trying to figure out how to generate URLs to send in the new user email that would specifically send them to the account in our Workspace (rather than just whatever personal account that they might have been using).  If I manually go in to the Admin tool and either create the accounts one-by-one or reset the passwords one-by-one, I can check a box and they'll get an automated note with an account-specific URL.  However, if I do things in bulk, either via csv upload or an API tool, there is no option to request that these mails get sent.  If I have to generate the welcome message using some other process, I don't know how to create the URL to include in that message.  How do I get this information?

Even after the initial login, it might be nice to have a way to explicitly specify an account to use, since "normal" URLs like "https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/home" just use whatever the first account in the current browser context is. Does such a thing exist? I'm looking for a way to reduce the number of access requests we get in Drive, Groups, etc. from people who have access to that content if they use their Workspace account.  I'm probably going to recommend using separate browser profiles, but some of the less technically inclined may struggle with that concept.

[StephenHind]

@taft no this does not exist, sorry.  Google has taken a different approach and you should make a dedicated Chrome Profile for your Google Workspace account, so you just use the correct profile rather than be signed in to multiple accounts in the same Chrome Profile.  This is one of the first steps in the Google Workspace User Help Center:

• Create profiles for personal and work accounts - Day 1: Set up Chrome browser, Gmail & Calendar

You can enforce that the Google Workspace accounts must be the primary and disallow secondary accounts (if you want to) and then that ensures that there's a dedicated Chrome Profile for that Google Workspace account - in the Google Workspace Admin Panel (https://admin.google.com) go to:

1. Devices
2. Chrome
3. Settings
4. User and Browser Settings
   Consider these settings (Filter for)
   • Separate profile for managed Google Identity
     and
   • Multiple sign-in access

Let us know if you have any further questions.

[taft]

I've been personally using multiple profiles on desktop/laptop for a while, and that works reasonably well to avoid situations where you're inadvertently using the wrong account (although it can be a pain if you want to do things like sync bookmarks between accounts)

How do you cope with this on mobile? https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824?co=GENIE.Platform%3DiOS&oco=1 says that the multiple profile option isn't well supported on mobile devices.  Their described method for Android looks a bit awkward, and they claim multiple profiles aren't supported at all on iOS (and similar).

I've done some poking around, and so far the closest thing I've found to the original request is this slightly modified URL that I derived from GAM documentation.

https://www.google.com/accounts/AccountChooser?Email=someone@example.com%23&continue=https://workspa...

Unfortunately, the behavior of this seems to vary a bit based upon which accounts are currently logged in.  It seems to be safe enough to use in a new user mail (which is the context in GAM), because you know that the user isn't logged in with the relevant ID (since the information and instructions on how to login for the first time are in this message).  In the quick testing I've done, this URL doesn't seem to be perfectly adapted for "normal/every day" use.

[icrew]

We just use a variant of the AccountChooser URL, like this, with no account specified:

https://accounts.google.com/AccountChooser?continue=https%3A//mail.google.com/a/example.org 

We then provide instructions "log in with your organizational Google account" as part of the link people click on.