At this point, the term “collaboration” has fully transitioned from an intriguing operational ideal, to an overhyped buzzword, to a legitimately essential consideration for any modern business to embrace. As such, it makes sense that there are so many collaboration-geared applications available today, with so many options to pursue this collaboration baked into each.
Let’s consider the many, many collaborative capabilities that are available in Google Drive—a tool that is used by many businesses today.
Let’s begin with the most basic of collaborative processes: sharing a file and the capability to edit it with others. Google Drive offers users a few means of doing so:
All of these options will lead to the same window appearing: The Share with people and groups panel. Let’s examine this panel to see what options it gives us.
From this panel, you can customize with whom and how access to your document can be shared. Need to share it with a certain department, or amongst a specific group of coworkers? The sharing panel makes it simple to do so by just typing in the appropriate names and email addresses, adding in a brief message, and specifying how much access you want to share:
You also have the ability to tweak these settings further, rescinding or inflating some of your invited collaborators’ capabilities as needs will dictate. The document owner can also edit or even remove these permissions outright at any time. With the Share pane open, simply click the button where a user’s access is displayed and select the appropriate option. Their ability to access the document can even be given an expiration date in this way—former viewers and commenters losing access with editors turned into commenters after a set number of days (of your choosing) have passed.
Using the Share pane, you can also open up your document from feedback to anyone that has the link to it. Under the Get Link area, simply select the option that states that anyone with the link can comment or edit, whichever is appropriate. When you no longer want your document to be shapeable by anyone who gets their hands on the right link, you can easily rescind this access as well.
Google Drive also makes it easy for you to identify which of your documents have been shared, by virtue of the small icon depicting two silhouettes next to the file name (although this won’t appear in Grid view).
Hopefully, this brief taste of the collaborative capabilities that Google Drive can offer helps to illustrate the value that it may be able to bring your business. Interested in finding out how else your team can use technology to improve their collaboration? Give us a call at (954) 739-4700 to talk to one of our team members about your options.
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