Peter Moriarty: 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.