I am sure you’re already familiar with the Google Drive concept – that virtual space that allows you to create, edit, share, and work on your documents regardless of your location and device. But the regular Drive space is designed for the individual. Now, wouldn’t it be nice if you could have such a space for your entire team? This way you could work together without actually having to be together.

This is exactly what Team Drives can offer: collaborative work for the entire team without having to cram all together in a small office. Even more, you can invite outside collaborators to view or edit certain documents and you can share with whoever you want.

To learn a bit more about Team Drives, take a look at the video below:

How Is Team Drives Useful For Your Company

Besides the fact that you get to decide who joins a team and you can assign each person specific rights, Team Drives also solves some of the few issues that show up in the regular Google Drive, like a better search system, preventing loss of files by accident or intent, and ownership is not a problem anymore.

Now as a business administrator, you can setup as many teams as you want/need and assign members to each team. Members can be added individually or you can use Google Groups, according to your preferences, but we recommend the latter method. It’s easier and it takes less time since you’ll be working with groups and not with each person’s profile. If you want to know more about the Google Group permissions method, take a look at our short tutorial here.

The main benefit Team Drives brings is an improved level of organization at team level. The fact that any member of the team (with the right permissions, of course) has the possibility to create, edit, comment, and share files, is a huge advantage over the regular Drive.  Even more, the permission system is clever enough to allow you to limit each person’s actions and access.

Keep in mind: each new team member is created with full rights by default so you will have to edit their access rights if they don’t have full access.
In our opinion, Google Team Drives is a fantastic way to speed up projects and get everyone involved even though some of your staff members are not physically present. This is an incredibly effective tool to encourage teamwork!

How to Get Team Drives

Team Drives is only available for Google Suite Business packages and above so if you’re a Basic user you won’t have access. However, it’s not difficult to upgrade your account and we’ll be more than happy to help you out. Just give us a call or send us an email and we’ll talk.

If you are on G Suite Business, then you need to first enable your organisation to use Team Drives from the administration console. (Starting in January 2018, Team Drives will be enabled by default.) Login with a G Suite administrator account to //admin.google.com, go to Apps > G Suite > Drive and Docs, open Sharing Settings, then uncheck the box next to “Team Drive creation” to enable Team Drives. Select “Save” to keep your setting.

Next, from the Apps > G Suite > Drive and Docs settings, open Migration Settings, and check the box to “Allow users to migrate files to Team Drives.” Again, select “Save” to keep your setting.

You can then watch the video above to learn how to use Team Drives. Dont forget to setup users as per Google Groups, see Best practices for using Google Drive