Most people who've used Google Drive for a long time, are missing out on one of its best new features. And do you know, that these best features are not only beneficial to individuals but also to businesses?
Well, let's get to know more about Google Drive and how it can boost up your organisation's productivity in this video.
Did you find this video helpful? Let us know by dropping a comment below!
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
Transcription:
Most people who've used Google Drive for a long time, are missing out on one of its best new features. And in this video, I'm going to take you through why you need to know about it, how to use it, and why it's so important, especially if you're a business owner. My name is Moriarty and I work with 1000s of small and medium sized business owners, and we help them get more productivity out of their Google tools, and everything in their business technology world. Now, one of our favorite tools is Google workspace. And we've rolled that out to literally 1000s of businesses. And we're now the number one partner across Australia and New Zealand for all things Google Small Business. Now we work with Google Drive every day helping business owners to share files with their teams. Although most business owners who have been using Google Drive for a long time, are still just using the standard shared folders in their Google Drive. Now, what you may not know is Google recently released a new feature called shared drives. Now, it's been around for about 18 months now. But many business owners have still not come across the feature, or some business owners that we work with are actually on the wrong Google workspace plan, and don't have access to this feature right now. Now, what this tool does is allows you to share files securely with your team in a much smoother, smarter and secure way, then you would just using a shared folder inside your my drive. Now I'm going to take you through some of the reasons why this is so critical that you implement this tool if you're in a business. And then at the end, I'm going to share with you some of the ways you can get started to get it set up right now. Now shared drives lives right inside your Google Drive. If you only see my drive right now, and you don't actually see the option for shared drives in your Google folders, then you may not have the administration settings set up correctly in your admin panel. Or you might not be on the right plan with Google workspace to get access to shared drive. So if you don't see it in your Google Drive right now, that's the first step is to check you're on the right plan and then go into your admin panel and check the chair drives are actually switched on in the Google Drive settings. Now, once you've done that, you want to actually start setting up some shared drives. And those shared drives are a little bit different to how my drive works. If you imagine that my drive is like your My Documents folder, that's the place where you should be storing things for you maybe documents that you're working on folders just for your own personal stuff files that you don't necessarily want to share with the team. Even though you always have the ability to share folders from my drive. There's some risks in actually using my drive to share folders. And I've outlined some of those risks inside some of our other videos on why you shouldn't use a Gmail account for your business. Now shared drives act a bit more like a corporate server. If you've ever worked for a business before and had like a physical Microsoft server and you would have had like a II drive or an F drive or an S Drive or something that sat in your my computer on your desktop where you would connect to and drop files into that would be automatically shared with the team shared drives work in the same way. So think about it like a corporate drive or a company shared drive that the business controls. Now some of the great features of this is additional security and permissions, which I'm going to cover in a moment. But the important thing to note is that you want to switch from putting right now everything inside your mind drive to instead putting some of your files into shared drives, and anything you want to share with the team. Rather than sharing it on an individual file basis. Instead putting those into shared files. Now the primary reason for that is once a file is added to the shared file, the business owns the file, the ownership of the file actually changes to the business. And you'll get a notification when you actually drop that file in. What that means is that once the file is shared there, it's actually owned by the business. And so for people inside your company who are sharing files there, or even for contractors or people outside your business, once they put in your file into the shared file section, then it's owned and secured and protected by the business. So let's talk about some of the ways that you can actually protect your files using shared drives. Well, some of the amazing security features allow you to lock down what can happen with any file inside a shared file. So you might decide, for example, that in a training manual, you don't want to have anyone be able to make a copy or print or download it because it's your intellectual property and you want to keep that protected. Or you might decide any files that go in a particular folder, you don't want them shared individually outside of that shared drive. And I use that feature for when I set up a finance drive, I want to make sure that no one's accidentally sharing spreadsheets with budgets or anything outside of the finance team. What that allows me to do as a business owner and an IT leader is protected, lock down those files to only the people that I want to access them. One of the last things that is absolutely brilliant is the levels of permissions that you can set up for different members of the drive. And so you can have some members who can contribute files, but not delete them. You can allow people to edit files, but not move folders around and make a mess. And so let's say for example, if you're an accounting firm, and you've got one client file for each one of your clients, you don't want anyone to go in there and accidentally you know, drop one into the other or make a mess of your beautiful folder structure if you're an operations manager. And so those features allow you and your team to have different levels of access for who can manage and maintain the folder structure. And who can access the different levels of files, one of the permissions that I give to owners of the business or managers of the business is the ability to delete and move things around, and the other people who are responsible for organizing and keeping things nice and neat and tidy. And what that means is that if you've got a large team, you don't have a mess being created in your folder structure, which so often happens in businesses, especially for contractors that are working with your business, when they place a file into a shared drive, they lose ownership of that file, but they can still work with the file as an editor. And when a contractor is working in your business, you want to make sure that any work they do for you is actually being placed into company ownership so that they don't clean out their Google Drive in three years time and accidentally delete files that you need for your business. And unfortunately, we've seen that happen many times, one of the next great features you can use with shared drives is group permissions. And so we use Google Groups for everything, all of our team members are in different groups inside our business. And we use those groups for permissions on shared drives. What that means is, is that when someone is on boarded into our business, rather than having to go through all the shared drives, and add them individually to the right drive, what we can do is actually placed them into the group. And inside that group, because the group has access to the shared drive, that person is automatically going to get access to all the resources in the shared drive. It also lets you be clever and say, Okay, well, I'd like executives and owners of the business to have full permission of everything that happens there. I want managers to be able to organize, but maybe not change the users in and out who can go in and out of the drive. I want all of my general staff to be able to add and contribute files to the shared drive. But I don't want them to be able to delete them. So nothing is accidentally deleted. And with contractors, you want them to submit things, but probably not to be able to delete things. And you want to be selective about which shared drives you give access to to your different contractors in the business. You may even have a training drive where you give read only access to contractors so they can see it. But they can't download it or make copies and you protect your files. That way you can access your shared drives across any of your devices, they work on the desktop using the Google Drive synchronization app, they obviously work on the web inside your Google Drive. And on your mobile phone, they'll work for access on the go as well. Your shared drives work everywhere, no matter what device you're using. And you can move a file from your my drive into a shared drive from any device or any platform as well. The thing I love about using shared drives is you no longer have to worry about sharing files individually, and you don't accidentally share files with anyone that shouldn't have access to them. Having shared drives in one place means that your team can keep productive, particularly if you're working remotely or in geographically dispersed location. What that means is that each person can just jump straight into the chair drive and see everything that they need to get their work done. Now storage for shared drives is counted in pulled storage for your business. Now Google has switched away from G Suite plans and onto Google workspace plans. If you're on a business plan, it includes storage per person, but all of that storage is put together into a pool. And so the company wide shared drives just count towards that pulled stories that don't count to individual user storage just to the overall company storage. And if you work with our team to have your Google Drive backed up, all of your shared drives will be backed up from any malicious damage, or anyone accidentally deleting files and then clearing out the trash. If you've got any questions or you think we've missed anything, let us know in the comments, drop one right below and we'll do our best to answer. We work with business owners all over the world. And we find that many come to us with their Google Drive a mess. Sometimes they've got half their file still in Dropbox, they've usually got files all over the place, there isn't a structure set up, there aren't any groups set up. And we developed a product that we call the Google Drive blueprint. And that literally helps business owners audit their data, organize their files, set up group structures, and then start to move the files into those group structures while educating the team along the way. We've taken hundreds and hundreds of businesses through this process. And think of it like a Marie Kondo for your digital worlds, we're helping you and your team to clean things up for everything in your Google Drive. And of course, we'll lift the lid on the rest of your Google workspace account and have a look at what else you've got there. Now, if you're interested in that product, you need to become a member of our service called Cloud concierge. What's concierge? Well, it's a help desk for Google. But it's much more than that as well. It's not just calls and you know, instant messaging with our support team when things break. But our team will actually help you with professional support for everything you need in the Google world. So we'll do an account audit, have a look at the whole of your Google workspace account, see any other areas where you may be under utilizing features or if you've got any of the security settings incorrect, or maybe you didn't quite get your DNS settings perfect, and your emails are going to spam to some of your customers. We're going to go through anywhere in that system where things are not quite right. And we're going to look at even some of the more serious business threats or you know, like maybe your email being broken. And we're gonna help you and your team have the right tools to basically unlock the power of Google workspace. And we have been working with businesses for over 10 years on everything Google, we are the absolute experts in helping you get the most out of the platform. So if you're interested in that there's a link below to join concierge and on the next page, you can make payment you can get started straightaway with our team and we are on hand to start working with your team. Now. Not only do we have our amazing professionals 14, but they are skilled up in amazing arrays of add ons for your Google workspace account. And our business is all about you playing a bigger game, getting more from your business and getting more from your technology. So if you're interested in that, check out the link below. We're going to aim to give you some time back in your business aim to get your team getting the most out of your investment in Google. And if that sounds like a good idea, there's a link right below. Otherwise, I'll see you in the next video.
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
