[2023] Organizing Shared Drives on Google | Creating Groups and Permissions

what if we stopped working with that contractor right and our old accountant of three years ago still has access to our files what if you employ a contractor to do some work with you and you share all of your Sops you know your operating procedures for the business and then years later they still have access and they want to start their own business in competition to you this what this does and this way of thinking gives us hygiene and how we share things so most people when they get started with Google Drive they just go ahead and they chuck all their stuff into their my drive and they end up with not only a bunch of folders here of what people also end up with let me show you this is something that looks a little bit like this a Google Drive that's just a complete mess now here's an interesting little fact Google actually designed Google drive to not need any folders and internally in Google they actually don't use many folders their philosophy is to just search for documents rather than actually storing them into a million different folders which is I think a bit weird probably not workable for a small business because I like to be able to browse through a folder hierarchy myself when I want to go and find something and I don't know what to search for but anyway that's a little Google story for you now most people's my drive quickly gets out of control but the second big issue with using my drive if you're using just normal shared folders usually what happens is if somebody else places a file in that folder they are the owner of that file and so what ends up happening is then we go here we go I've found a file here I won't open the file but can you see here that there is somebody else that's the owner what ends up happening is you have your my drive which is your kind of like bucket of stuff sitting in your Google Drive and then you have other people potentially who can create files now that might be a contractor that might be a virtual assistant that might be a friend it might be a supplier they've created a file with their own Gmail account and they've placed that file into the folder in your my drive however you do not own that file even though you own the folder you own the folder you don't actually own the file sitting in that folder what ends up happening is somebody goes to clean up their my drive they delete files out of their my drive and because they're the owner they disappear they disappear from your my drive and so therefore you lose data and what happens is customers will come to us every now and again and they'll say hey guys I've just had Google eat all of my files and we say huh that's interesting did Google eat your files and then you know when we look deeper into it it's because there's been one of these old folders sitting in the my drive that they've shared and not the owner of the files inside the folder someone else has deleted files and then they're gone until that person reshares them or undelets them they're gone unless you had some kind of backup that was copying them they're gone so what's the solution the solution is to switch to Shared drives and shared drives give us a company owned drive just like when if you've ever worked in corporate before where you had a company server you would have a company drive and if you saved a file there instead of your my docs the company would then own the file and in some cases you would be restricted from deleting that file you wouldn't be allowed to delete it anymore because there would be security missions which would stop you from doing that and so new rule and I want you to write this down no folders in my drive zero the only folders that I've got sitting in my my drive are these are some of my screencasts you can see me automatically puts my recordings into here I've got a demo folder I've got like downloads from my computer that I sync to my Google Drive that's it nothing that I use for my business that I share with any of my staff or anyone outside of my business sits in my drive because it's just pretty much useless once you have a team of more than yourself more than one person so we set up our share drives and if you don't see shared drives in your Google workspace account right now you just need to make sure you're on the business standard plan that's important here's how we get this working in a very very clever way now what most people do is they create a shared drive and then they just start adding people right so you know you create a share drive you go to ad members and then you just start typing in people's names however that's not actually the smartest way to do things because when you're onboarding staff what happens is you've got to think to yourself oh what are all the files that they need to get access to right and then you've got to add them to the marketing Drive their marketing of them to the finance drive your legal documents those kind of things you've got to find all the places where you add people so what we can do instead is configure groups Insider admin panel and then we can use group based permissions for sharing resources inside Google workspace so I'm going to show you how to set up some very basic groups inside workspace so we're going to go into our admin panel admin.google.com if you don't know where this one is we're going to go to directory and then groups and we're going to add a group in here now I'm going to create a group and the easiest way to do this is to just create if you're a small business and I'm assuming small business means like 10 employees are under if you're larger you might want to go for more sophisticated group structure but if you're a small business you just keep it very simple the first group you're going to create is for the team so I just call that one team then I'm going to add I'm going to tick the box for Security Group it probably doesn't hurt to untick this box if you don't want people to be able to email the group that's a good one so if you if you switch off who can contact people switch off external that'll stop people from being able to email the group from outside your company all right cool being created and let's add some people into this group so let's add members add Gypsy mypa let's add red our head of Revenue who you met already this morning let's add Scott who's on the call to our CEO cool so I've added some users to a group here and now when I set up my shared drives let's create a fresh shared drive I'm going to create the team drive that's going to be my files for everyone in the company I don't need to you know restrict them from any anyone got my team drive I'm going to go to manage members and I'm just going to add all I need to do is test Dash oops teen and I can then choose the level of permission for this team let's say all right I'm going to allow everyone to add and edit files but not not delete any files using the contributor feature and there we go Okay so we've added this I'll just let it refresh excellent Okay so we've created our group we've created our shared drive and then we've added the group to the shared drive so only the group have access here so you can see that I'm the manager of the drive I'm the only person who can say who has access to the drive or doesn't have access to the drive and then anyone who gets added to that team group automatically gets access to this drive now if you want to replicate this and you're a small business you only really need to create four groups for your business if you want to keep it simple four groups and get ready to write these down number one is executive so that's your owners so that's you and any other directors business partners or owners in the business number two is you can call it management or you might have a dedicated one just for finances right just for accounting so you might call that management group or all the finances group number three is all team that's the one I just created so that's everyone in the company and number four is contractors and so what your shared Drive ends up looking like is and you can see I've got quite a few here in it genius we're a large business 50 plus employees in the group and so we have this by department or by area in the business and you can see we've got executive we've got Finance got up level we have a tract which is marketing we have excite which is sales engage is our concierge team and then we have deliver and support they're pretty self-explanatory now notice all of these except a few naughty people who've been added there somehow all of these are just shared with groups they're not shared with individuals what this does is it stops The Accidental leakage of access to files or access to resources which is very easy to happen now what do we normally do we create a document and let's say we've got a contractor in the business maybe it's our accountant or maybe it's someone else right with that contractor we just share resources you know willy-nilly what if we stop working with that contract right and our old accountant of three years ago still has access to our files what if you employ a contractor to do some work with you and you share all of your Sops you know your operating procedures for the business and then years later they still have access and they want to start their own business in competition to you this what this does and this way of thinking gives us hygiene and how we share things but it also means that you don't end up with the dreadedness fortune of having files disappear or data disappear when you share something with someone and or share a folder with someone in your mydrive and then they become the owner of files that get placed in there if you like this content please hit subscribe and hit the Bell notification so you can be notified when we go live or drop new content on the channel if you'd like to connect with us hit us up on social media or join our free community group all the links to that are right below this 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Channel: itGenius 🤓 Biz Tech Experts

Views: 36,590

Keywords: google drive, google workspace, what is google workspace, google drive files, organize files on google drive, files on drive

Id: EcEPXOCoa0w

Length: 8min 51sec (531 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 28 2023