This page explains the “Shared Drives” in Google Drive.
What are “Shared Drives”
The “Shared Drives” in Google Drive is a feature that enables teams or organizations with multiple members to collaboratively manage files.
In the standard Google Drive (My Drive), files and folders are managed by specific accounts. If owners decide to leave the sharing group—especially in cases where they leave the University of Tokyo and their accounts expire—they must undertake the tedious task of transferring ownership of the files and folders to others beforehand. Any omission or oversight happening in this process may bring the risk of losing files.
On the other hand, by using “Shared drives”, management can be shared among multiple members. If someone is leaving the sharing group, the only necessary action is to update the ownership setting. Even if it is not managed in advance, this action can be executed afterwards, as long as there are other owners remaining in the group. However, it is necessary to take precautions to prevent a scenario where all the owners of the documents leave the group at the same time.
Therefore, for teams and organizations where members frequently change but require continuous file sharing, the “Shared drives” feature is recommended.
Glossary
As described above, the “Shared Drives” in Google Drive refers to a special area where management of files is shared among multiple members, rather than simply sharing files within Google Drive. Please be aware of this distinction.
In addition, there is an icon named “Shared with me” in the Google Drive interface. Selecting this icon will display all files shared with other people (including files not shared as Shared drives). Please note that this feature is different from “Shared drives”.
The counterpart of “Shared drives” is “My Drive”. All files and folders belonging to a specific owner, as well as those shared with others, are stored in “My Drive” of the owner.
Using with a UTokyo account
This page explains how to use the shared drives with your “ECCS Cloud Email” account of the University of Tokyo. However, please note that the creation and management of shared drives via ECCS Cloud Email are restricted due to storage limitations. For more details, please refer to “ECCS Storage Management System”.
Procedure for using shared drives
The following section outlines the procedures for creating shared drives and sharing files using these drives.
Creating Shared drives
With ECCS Cloud Email, you can create shared drives using the “ECCS Storage Management System”, instead of doing it on the interface of Google Drive. For more details, please refer to “ECCS Storage Management System”.
Add and manage members of a shared drive
The owners of a shared drive, along with the people (within the same team or organization) who will have access to the files, can be added as members of the shared drive. Set this feature up right after creating the shared drive, and then update it as needed, for example, whenever there are changes in membership. The procedure is as follows:
- Select “Shared drives” from the left menu on the Google Drive interface. The created shared drive will be displayed.
- Right-click on the name of the shared drives list and click on the “View members” in the displayed menu.
- For future additions and deletions, follow the same procedures outlined in “The setup process for sharing with specific individuals” on the page “Sharing Files Using Google Drive”(an English translation is planned).
- The types of access authorization in shared drives are slightly different. Please refer to the following explanation for details.
- You cannot copy a link to the shared drive itself. People who are added as members to the shared drive will see it listed when they open “Shared Drives” in the left menu on the Google Drive interface. Please access it from there.
Access authorizations to shared drives
Here are the various types of access authorizations (the allowed operations) in shared drive for people who you want to share files with:
- Viewer
- Viewers can read files but cannot edit them.
- The access level is the same as that for “My Drive” (scenarios other than shared drives).
- Commenter
- Commenters can read files and add comments. In addition, in the case of Google Documents, they are allowed to make editing suggestions. However, direct editing of files is not allowed.
- The access level is the same as for “My Drive” (scenarios other than shared drives).
- Contributor
- Contributors can read and edit files directly.
- Contributors are not allowed to delete or move files.
- Contributors are not allowed to share files with people outside the group members.
- The access level is similar to that for editors in “My Drive” (scenarios other than shared drives).
- Content manager
- In addition to reading and editing, content managers can delete and move files.
- Content managers can share files in the shared drive with individuals outside the group. However, this operation can be denied with the appropriate settings.
- Content managers are not allowed to carry out operations such as changing members of the shared drives or changing overall settings of the shared drives.
- Manager
- Managers can conduct all operations of the shared drives.
- Members with this access level can be regarded as owners of the shared drives.
How to use files and folders in the shared drives
In the shared drives, operations on files or folders such as creating, editing, uploading and downloading can be performed in the same manner as for the standard Google Drive (My Drive). Please refer to “The basic usage of Google Drive”(an English translation is planned) for more details.
In addition, a shared drive can have multiple owners and members, which allows the sharing of files from the shared drives. With this feature, files and folders stored in a shared drive can be shared with people outside the shared drive. Using this feature, the operations are the same as for “My Drive” (Google Drive other than shared drives). Please refer to “Share files using Google Drive”(an English translation is planned) for more details.