Business Starter Shared Drive - Viewer vs Contributor

[kenhamshaw]

I have a workspace domain with split licensing - some Business Starter and some Business Standard. I have some existing shared drives I want to add members with a Business Starter license. It will only let me add them as a viewer. I keep getting the message "That user is not licensed to have higher than View access."

Is this because the Shared Drive for Business Starter has not been rolled out to my domain yet? Or are Business Starter always going to be limited to View only. The recent announcement for rolling out Shared Drives for Starter didn't address that I noticed. 

[StephenHind]

@kenhamshaw I would imagine ti will change when you get pooled storage for Starter.

[remyburger]

Shared drives for Business Starter hasn't rolled out yet, even if your Business Starter domain is already on pooled storage. Once available later this year, you will be able to assign any member role, not limited to View only anymore.

[da-rs]

Hi,

Thanks for the information. We are about to action a large rollout across our group. It would be extremely helpful to know when this Starter Shared Drive access will be live. When it is live, are there any changes to the admin portal required to enable greater than view access on shared drives for Starter users?

[remyburger]

The work to transition every single Business Starter customer is still on-going. And only once that's fully done, we can then start the roll out of shared drives in Business Starter. Even though I can't share an exact date right now, I can share that shared drives won't launch before the end of the year. It will be early 2024.

Once we launch, you won't need to make any changes in the admin portal (we will automatically opt-in everyone, and you could opt-out if you wanted). You will need to update all the users and groups on existing shared drives though, e.g. if you wanted to change them from Viewers to Content Managers or any other role.

[da-rs]

Hi again. We're continuing our workspace rollout. We're really waiting on these changes being rollout for the Starter Accounts. Please could you give me an update when we can expect this to be live? Many thanks. 

[gcloudnetworks]

We recently transitioned to a mixed license model, incorporating both Starter and standard, and have since encountered significant difficulties concerning shared drive access and write permissions for our users. Previously, users were able to access and modify content on shared drives using external domains seamlessly. However, this functionality seems to be impaired following the recent changes.

The core of the issue lies in the inability of all users to access shared drives with write permissions, which is critical for our day-to-day operations. It is currently unclear to us whether the implementation of pooled storage is a prerequisite for restoring this functionality or if there are other underlying issues at play.

Given the urgency of the situation and its impact on our operations, we kindly request your expedited assistance in resolving this matter. Additionally, we would greatly appreciate an update on the current status and any potential solutions or workarounds that may be available to us.

[kenhamshaw]

You'll probably need to switch back starter licenses to at least standard. Starter licenses are supposed to get write access to shared drives, but it's unclear when, or even if, it really happens.

[icrew]

It sounds like this may be an issue that's more likely to get solved by contacting Google Support (see https://support.google.com/a/answer/1047213?hl=en for how) than posting here.

This is a community site of people who run Google Workspace for their organizations around the globe. 

Cheers,

Ian Crew
UC Berkeley