Google Shared Drive Request

Shared drives

Google Shared drives provide project-focused shared storage for departments or teams. Google Shared drives can be used by offices, departments and schools, and by faculty and students, to store documents and files related to a project or other focus theme (e.g., budgets). Unlike the My Drive, files you create in a Shared drive are owned by the drive itself, not by your Google account. This eliminates the issue of data being lost when a former employee’s account is deleted, as can happen with My Drive information. Shared drives are meant to hold all the documents for the project or topic.

Google Shared drives are accessed through the Google Drive web interface, or by using Google Drive for desktop on the local computer.

While still using Google Drive “My Drive” for personal files, the “Shared drives” support:

• Maintaining file access after an employee leaves the institution

• Improved Sharing: All members of a Shared drive see the same content

• Content Discoverability: When you add a user to a Google Group, that user is automatically added to all the Shared drives that include that Group

• Access files from anywhere

• 99.9% availability and no scheduled downtime

Recent Shared drives changes and improvements

• Google has a real-time presence feature for Microsoft Office. After opting in to this feature, you will see real-time presence status indicators in the bottom right-hand corner of Word, Excel, and Powerpoint windows that are active in the foreground. Real-time presence checks to see if someone else is viewing or editing a Microsoft Office file stored on Google Drive while you have it open. It will alert you and them to help avoid version conflicts. When conflicts do occur, it’ll help you resolve them with a side-by-side view of the document versions, allowing you to easily merge them into one up-to-date file.

Known Shared drive issues as of February 2021

Google reports the following issues with Shared drives or Drive for desktop:

• You can't store some file types in Shared drives, including (but not limited to):

  • Google Maps

  • Google Photos

  • Some virtual file types

  • Files owned by other domains

• When using Drive for desktop, you cannot move a folder from My Drive to a Shared drive.