Possible to limit access to subfolders within a parent Shared Drive?

[infoalloycrew]

We use Google Shared Drives for our company folders, giving access to our full team via groups (i.e. allemployees@company.com). Is there a way to limit a sub-folder within a Shared Drive so that only select members of a different group have access to the sub-folder?

For example:

• Shared Drive - Master Admin Folder (access: allemployees@company.com)
  • Marketing sub-folder (access: allemployees@company.com)
  • Finances sub-folder (access: justseniorleaders@company.com) 

In the example above, can I make it so that the employees tied to justseniorleadership@company.com are the only people with access to the Finances folder within the Master Admin Shared Drive? We don't want everyone tied to allemployees@company.com to have access to the Finances folder. 

Should we be sharing Shared Drive folders some other way than using Google Groups?

[icrew]

You can share subfolders within a Shared Drive--see https://support.google.com/a/answer/7662202?hl=en for the details of how you do so.

As a quick summary, you'd only add very few people (mainly your workspace admins, maybe your senior leadership) to the top level of Shared drives, and instead share individual folders/subfolders within the shared drive with the folks that need access.

This is conceptually very similar to the "Waterfall" permissions that Box uses, and they have a nice video that explains it. Check out https://support.box.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043697254-Understanding-Folder-Permissions . It does require a bit of rethinking, but it works really well, and is pretty maintainable.

Hope that helps,

Ian

[infoalloycrew]

Thanks icrew - that definitely makes sense. We've been giving access to the allemployees@company at the Shared Drive level so that they can easily view all files within their Google Drive for Desktop, as we use it interchangeably with the browser. Is there an easy way for them to see all files that they have access to within Google Drive for Desktop, similar to Box's "All Files" in the video explainer that you shared?

[icrew]

Hmmm. Good question, because "shared with me" doesn't show up in Drive For Desktop (for reasons I've never understood). They could alsways do the "Add shortcut to drive" method from the three dots menu at the right of each line in Shared with me (screenshot below), but yes, that's a touch manual. Maybe others will have better ideas!