What's a good workaround for Triggers being disabled because they were created by a now-disabled Google Workplace user?

Question

My company uses Google Suite and there are a handful of engineers who develop projects within Sheets (often for use by others with less technical backgrounds).

Some of these projects have involved creation of Triggers (e.g. "save the contents of this Sheet every day at midnight").

What I've discovered is that when one of those engineers leaves the company and their account is disabled, triggers written by that user become disabled and remaining users can neither view nor edit their contents. Nor can they see details of triggers created by a different (active) user.

Are there known workarounds to get the contents of this type of trigger? Or is there a better practice to employ that doesn't tie status of a trigger to the status of a user?

Answer 1

Google has a guide for scripts collaboration : Collaborating with Other Developers . Briefly, they suggest to save scripts in a Shared Drive as this will allow several users to do the same than the owner of a script stored in their "My Drive", but this requires the use of Google Workspace account having access to Share Drives.

If the script creators don't have access to a Shared Drive then ask them to transfer the ownership of the scripts to be used by others to a more stable user account. IMHO the best is to have a generic user account not tied to a specific person, i.e. scripts@example.com., one additional advantage is that it might help to differentiate on the version history if the changes made where done "by a real person" or by a trigger.

Another option is that the domain admin could transfer the files ownership from the disabled account to another user account, either to a real person account or to a generic account, i.e. archivist@example.com, then someone having access to that account could do find the corresponding script and do the required adjustments.

Depending on the number of engineers and size of the company you might also want to keep an inventory of all the scripts used by others and implement some sort or pair-review focused on script ownership succession.