You are in the wrong workspace

What you see#

Familiar screens with unfamiliar contents: conversations you do not recognise, people you have never contacted, a business profile that is not yours. Or the opposite — everything is missing, and a colleague looking at the same app can see it all.

Both are the same fact from different sides. One workspace is active for your session, and it is not the one you had in mind.

How the workspace is actually chosen#

Once, at sign-in, from your membership — and then used for every query the request makes. It is deliberately not taken from a body, a query string or a header, which has two consequences worth knowing. You cannot reach another workspace by editing an address, and you cannot switch to your own by editing one either.

• The session decides. Two sessions in one browser can hold two different workspaces at once and neither is wrong.
• The session also carries an audience. An operator session and a customer session take different paths through the same application, so the same screen can differ between them.
• Every query in the request is filtered to the resolved workspace, and filtered again in the database. Being in the wrong workspace is a navigation problem, never a leak.

The causes, most likely first#

1. You signed in with a different Google account from the one you meant — the commonest cause by a distance, and invisible until you look at which account the browser used.
2. You belong to more than one workspace and the session resolved to another of them.
3. An old tab is still showing a previous session's screens. The data is a snapshot from before; a reload will correct it.
4. Two sessions genuinely exist in the same browser at once, and the tab you are in belongs to the other one.

What Connect completed, and what it did not#

Completed: authentication, workspace resolution and every scoping rule that follows from it. Nothing malfunctioned — the request was answered correctly for the session that made it.

Not completed: nothing, in the technical sense. What did not happen is the thing you wanted, because the records you were looking for were never inside the workspace the session resolved to. This is the failure mode that most reliably looks like data loss and most reliably is not.

Getting back to the right one#

1. Reload the screen before anything else.

   Result A stale tab is corrected. If the contents are the same afterwards, the session really is on another workspace.

2. Check which Google account is signed in.

   Result If it is the wrong one, sign out and back in with the right address. Signing in as somebody else ends the session it replaced on that browser only — your other devices are untouched.

3. If you belong to several workspaces, switch to the one you want.

   Result The session's workspace changes; nothing about the data moves, and nothing is copied between workspaces by switching.

4. If a colleague can see records you cannot, compare memberships rather than screens.

   Result Two people in different workspaces will describe the same app completely differently and both be right.

What an administrator can do, and when to escalate#

• Confirm which workspaces the person is a member of, and that the intended membership is active.
• Confirm the address: access is granted against one Google account, and a near-identical alias resolves to nothing.
• Where somebody has been given access to the wrong workspace, remove that membership rather than asking them to avoid it.

Questions#

Related#

• Which workspace you are in
• The operator's workspace and a customer's
• Workspace isolation
• You cannot sign in
• Data that should be here is not
• Sessions