how to encourage or force users to use shared drive rather than My Drive ?

[patrick_nomblot]

Hello, 

In a large company, keeping control of the documentation can quickly become a challenge. With shared drive,  it becomes easier but users still have the facility to create spontaneous spaces on My Drive and thus create improvised document spaces, which quickly becomes a mess.

Forbidding is rarely a good solution in security, educating and empowering seems more realistic to me.

The feature I suggest would be to be able to make users getting an alert message each time they create a new object (file or folder) in My Drive rather than in a dedicated shared drive. 

the goal is also to avoid having to sort all the docs of a user when he leaves the company (and when we delete his account). Since on My Drive, docs can be attached to other users' drives without being attached to their own drive, or be orphaned docs. Enforcing shared drive looks to be helpfull 

What do you think of this problem ?

[bill_pier3]

I found this to be down to training.  I took every opportunity to inform and tutor my folks about Shared Drives.  Moreover, documents that they needed were only available on the Shared Drives.  When documents were created on My Drive, I immediately took steps, when I knew about it, to help facilitate moving the data to the Shared Drives.  

Eventually people got it -- My Drive == personal storage ... Shared Drive == Team/Project storage.

[patrick_nomblot]

I agree, training is important, I would even like to make it mandatory, but forcing people to learn doesn't really work. On the other hand, in my experience, making the user aware that he needs it is much more effective. Let me explain why in our context:

We are an international company, with more than 2000 users and a lot of employee changes regularly. An initial training exists but it requires a lot of capacity because the number of subjects to learn is important, there is not only Google, far from it. Inviting the user to ask for training at the moment he needs it allows to deliver this training at the right time, when he will be in a maximum state of receptivity, hence my suggestion.

Most of the users understand that Shared Drive should be used but My Drive doesn't ask them any effort to arrange the files. As Shared Drive is also very limited to organize shares, improve readability, and thus find the relevant one quickly, users often take the My Drive shortcut, which is already better than sharing a file via email.

That's why, even if he has had the training one day, remind the user where the company's document rules are, isn't he flouting them? At the very least, allowing the user to express his training needs at that moment via a Google Form would be really great.

• It's when the user creates a doc in "My Drive" that the questions arise:
• Is it really the right place for this doc?
• Do you know the document management rules of your company?
• Would you like to be trained on your company's document management rules?

Hence the idea of a personalized popup so that the person realizes that he may need to revise training or redo it.

Patrick

[KAM]

+1 from me.  I train on this as well but would like a way to encourage people to use shared drives too.  If you create a feature idea, I'll vote for it! -KAM