Google Team Drives - Now Available for GSuite!

Team Drives

Last Fall, Google announced the Early Adoption Program for Google Team Drives.  This feature - available in Google Drive - allows teams to create and use a Team Drive, which is a collaborative space to create and share files.  

Who can use Team Drives?  

Now available for GSuite for Business and Education, anyone in your domain - individuals and Google Groups included - can be added to a Team Drive.  Likewise, anyone in your domain can create a team drive.  

Benefits

By creating a Team Drive, any files that are in the drive can be viewed or edited - depending on managed access - by anyone in the team.  If any member of the team leaves, no files are lost, as the files belong to the team - not an individual.

Access

There are 4 tiers of access for members of a Team Drive:

• Full Access - can manage members and Upload/Delete/Edit all Files
• Edit Access - can edit all files and upload new files
• Comment Access - can view and comment on all files
• View Access - can view all files

This allows you to set users with different levels of access, to prevent accidental deletion of files, and to prevent users from uploading content without permission.

As a general rule it will be good to set at least 2-3 other users you trust to Full Access.  This will allow management of the Team Drive to continue if one person leaves the organization.

Files

Currently, the only files you can create within a Team Drive are Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, and Drawings.  

If a file is deleted, it will reside in the Team Trash for 30 days, upon which time it will be deleted forever.

Video Tutorial

Watch this video for more information or read more regarding the release of this feature at the GSuite Update Blog.