I am a company owner using Google Apps for Work, and managing all company resources in Google drive via personal Google Drive/sharing with my team members (also part of my Google Apps for Work account). Currently, many of my employees contribute files and folders to our architecture, and since I'm on personal drives, this IP is not centrally owned by my company, but by the individual people who are my employees. This is a risk I wish to avoid. One thing I CAN do, however, is assign various access/rights to folder, sub-folder and files within our architecture, which is a critical function to have.
I wish to have ALL IP (folders & files created by me and my employees, owned and controlled at the company level instead of the individual level, and so moving to Shared Drive is the obvious upgrade to do, HOWEVER, there is an inhibitor to upgrading. Unlike the Personal Drive which we're all using now, Shared Drive allows us absolutely no ability to manage permissions to anything below the ROOT DRIVE level. This means that while I now can grant one of my employees access to a sub-folder, or a file at any level within our architecture, upgrading will reduce this ability to only grant permissions to my employees at the ROOT DRIVE level. This will require me either to choose to give my employees a single permission across multiple business lines, OR force us to change our file/folder organization to accommodate, thus causing us to create a ton of disjointed drives at the highest level, just to be able to set permissions in a way that is safe.
I am looking for a corporate drive option with Google that provides singular ownership of all resources (as Shared Drives does and Personal Drive does not), AND the ability to assign permissions at the Folder, Sub-folder and File level throughout our architecture (as Personal Drive currently does, and Shared drive does not).
Hi @JulianSch :
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
Hi @JulianSch
I'm just an admin like you (greetings from the University of California, Berkeley!), sharing what I know. I do know that the processes I've outlined in my response above work for us, for whatever that's worth....
Also, this is something you can try/experiment with before you move all of your content there--give it a whirl and see if it works for you.
Cheers,
Ian
@JulianSch @icrew is 100% correct. Shared drive provides the ownership you want:
https://support.google.com/a/answer/7212025?hl=en
"Your organization owns the files in a shared drive, not an individual. When an employee leaves and an admin deletes their account, their files remain in shared drives."
If you are interested, I work for a premier partner for Google and this is the type of work we do helping customers safely and securely migrate and manage the cloud. I take pride in our contracts setting up organizations big and small for success with Google!
-KAM
Hi @JulianSch, Google Shared Drive doesn't currently allow you to remove access from sub-folders if you're given access to Shared Drive as a whole, but you can add access to sub-folders at any level - which is why the process outlined by @icrew is the best way to manage access.
I also recommend using email lists (Google Groups) to manage as much Shared Drive access as possible, so that as staffing changes are updated through email lists, Shared Drive access is automatically updated as well.