I am having a horrible time getting my head around this, it doesn't feel intuitive at all, the FAQs are pretty poor and even watching countless YouTube videos doesn't help much.
Part of the problem is I am picturing it as an online file server so what works and makes sense on Windows Server for example doesn't translate to Google Drive at all.
Currently a firm I am taking over support for uses Google Drive but they have shared accounts, so a department such as Finance has a single account that multiple users log on to. The problem with that is accountability, some files were leaked but as the account is shared the owner can't tell who is responsible. So I have been brought in to remove all existing accounts, set up individual accounts, and then configure the permissions.
There are quite a few problems with this:
- With Google Drive a file/folder created by a user is private until they choose to share it with a particular user/group - This means I can't login as admin, see all files and take ownership of them before deleting a users account. Instead I have to manually specify a source and target user and transfer ownership. I initiated one such transfer about 30 mins ago and there is nothing to tell me how far into the transfer it is or how long it will take. I have to repeat this for numerous users.
- Although they are called folders, they are actually labels. In one respect this is helpful as a single file can appear to exist in two places, but the same file is accessed from either location. But if you share a 'folder' with edit access with a group, anyone in that group can move the 'folder', if they move it to a location which is not shared then the other users lose access, it simply disappears (unless they are the owner in which case they have to search for it).
- Once you share a folder with a user or group it doesn't automatically appear in their drive, they have to move it from the shared section to the Drive. Not much of a problem if you are using the online version but they use the Desktop version so they have to go online to drag the folders. Some of these users aren't great on computers so anything like this will cause problems. I would suggest they just use it online but apparently the desktop version is far better.
If anyone has experience with this and doesn't mind me sending them a few messages I would appreciate it. As for anyone who hasn't used it I will try to log my experience here to help others (or put them off using Google!!).
Social Networking Bookmarks