When data-enabled users are added to Backstory, their business-relevant emails and calendar meetings are automatically retrieved and processed at a pre-configured interval. However, for this background process to work without issue, Backstory must be granted permissions to access users’ data.
If users’ permissions are not granted or granted incorrectly, they will appear as ‘Errored’ in the Backstory web application.
For more information on how Backstory connects to mailbox providers and grants permissions, check out Connecting Backstory and G Suite and Setting up Microsoft 365 Team Access using Microsoft Graph API for Backstory.
How it Works
By default, Backstory attempts to access users’ mailboxes and calendars every 15 minutes to pull net-new activities into the application for processing and check for updates to existing activities.
If this process fails for any user, they’ll be automatically flagged as having a “permission issue.” A permission issue at the user level simply means the Backstory integration is unable to access that user’s mailbox and/or calendar to retrieve activities.
If any users have permission issues, they will be visible on the Users & Teams page in the Backstory web application.
Click on the tab labeled Permission Errors to view these users.
This is the tab where all users with data retrieval errors will be listed. Users are automatically moved in and out of this tab when permission issues are detected and resolved.
Users are listed by their email addresses. Use this as the identifier when resolving errors manually.
Below the Permission Error status is a timestamp that confirms when the permission error arose. For some users, this is simply around when the user was added. In other cases, this will confirm when the Backstory integration has lost the necessary permissions to access the user’s mailbox.
If there are a large number of users listed in the Permission Errors tab, use the Export users with errors feature to export a .CSV of these users for future reference.
Why do Permission Errors Occur?
As aforementioned, a user will end up in the Permission Errors tab if Backstory cannot access their mailbox and/or calendar.
This can happen for a number of reasons, such as:
The user was accidentally added to Backstory, and/or was never configured on the mailbox/calendar side.
The user has left the company.
The user has been promoted and/or changed roles, which resulted in Backstory’s revocation of access to their mailbox.
There is a typo in the user’s email address.
The user was removed from, or was never added to, the Backstory Organizational Unit in G Suite.
The Backstory user was not added to the O365 mail-enabled security group (if applicable).
Resolving Permission Errors
The key to resolving permission issues in Backstory is to work with your mailbox (O365/ G Suite) administrator to ensure the errored user(s) are valid and configured correctly.
Please refer to the documentation for O365, and G Suite for more information on how users are typically configured.
Things to Consider
For teams using O365 as their mailbox provider, resolved permission errors may take up to 24 hours to reflect in Backstory.
The Backstory web application does not currently surface the specific API error returned by the mailbox provider for errored users. If this is needed, please get in touch with Backstory support.
Need any help? Drop us a line at support@backstory.ai.