Can google service account be used for specific user documents retrival?

Question

Requirement:

I want to access the Google drive documents of a particular user programmatically(being someone@gmail.com is his email id).

Present Condition:

I am using Google drive SDK to achieve this. The sample provided by Google launches a browser process with an URL which asks me to login with that user account and then give an authorization code to actually perform my tasks.

Problem:

I want to automate the entire process. I don't want any manual interaction in this process.

Findings: While hunting for the solution I got Use regular Google accounts as application-owned accounts which looked friendly to my solution.

Questions:

1. Please suggest me a way I can automate Google authentication.
2. Is there anything like google enterprise solution such that an admin account can look into any account in that organization?

Answer 1

You can perform Google Apps domain-wide delegation of authority to allow a Google Apps domain administrator to access data on behalf of one of the users in the domain. This only works on Google Apps domain and not for gmail.com accounts (for which there's no domain administrator role). You can learn more about this feature on https://developers.google.com/drive/delegation