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Google Drive has been a favorite cloud storage platform for years, providing users with an easy to understand interface, and a host of powerful functionalities that both match and outstrip many desktop office suites. The convenience and adaptability of the platform leaves little wonder as to why it’s so widely used and trusted. As usage of Google Drive has grown significantly in an enterprise setting, IT and administrators have found it increasingly difficult to centrally manage directories and files which were not owned by one particular user. With this in mind, Google created Team Drives: shared spaces designed for teams, enabling easy storage, organization, and access to files, anywhere, anytime. Taking the best of the Google Drive MyDrive platform and expanding it to serve enterprise-level needs, Team Drives brings an organization’s shared content to a central location for easier management and enhanced collaboration. With team drives you can easily create new drives and manage membership from the admin panel:

Productivity Right Out the Gate

One of the greatest strengths of Team Drives —and one users will notice almost immediately—is its intuitive design, ease of use, and simplicity of set-up. Anyone familiar with Google Drive will feel right at home in Team Drives, and even those who are new to the interface will have little trouble understanding how to take advantage of its wide-ranging functionalities. Because of this, Team Drives makes the process of onboarding extremely straight forward. There’s no need to stress about new hires losing valuable time downloading, installing, and learning a new system before being able to get down to work. Rather, users can begin creating and sharing content almost immediately, and employers can instantly share all the right documents with new hires, cutting down on crucial time spent trying to integrate a new user into a byzantine file system.

Easy to Control, Easy to Optimize

Permissions are often the most frustrating aspect of collaboration: a disorienting and disorganizing quagmire if done incorrectly. This is especially true in large organizations where keeping track of who needs access to what, and who is sharing with whom can take up just as much time as crafting the files that need to be shared in the first place.

With Team Drives, there’s little need to worry about these issues, because Google’s platform provides admins with a host of tools to monitor sharing in a way that doesn’t bury them in a deluge of permissions. In order to prevent the need to constantly re-share documents, Team Drives provides all users in a given drive with access to all the files therein automatically. After that, admins can tailor permissions as they need to. Before, highly collaborative files were stored in individual user accounts, leading to delays, lost files, miscommunications, and overall disarray. Luckily, the folks at Google picked up on this, and ensured that Team Drives does away with all that superfluous confusion.

Learn How Intuit Consolidated Google Drive Accounts with Cloud FastPath

A Cloud Platform that’s as Smart as Its Users

Supplementary to the intuitive permissions functionality of Team Drives is its unprecedented smart organization, which uses machine learning to help users quickly access documents that they’ll need for given projects. With large organizations, a business may have hundreds or even thousands of users on Team Drives, creating mountains of files and data to sift through. Even with straightforward permissions, it can be a real time-waster to try to hunt down necessary documents, and Google understands that.

With the Quick Access feature, users can access the documents that are most active in their organizations, based on engagement as well as keywords that Team Drives senses are popular among users of an organization throughout the day. It’s no longer necessary to worry about tagging, metadata, or the headache of sifting through eight different files with similar names. Now, you can access the right files based on what your team is using and what other local users are discussing.

Gone but Not Forgotten

It can be a hassle to determine file ownership in the wake of a team member departing your organization, but with Team Drives, you don’t need to worry. Because files are owned by teams as opposed to individuals in separate drives, users don’t have to stress about transferring ownership and permissions in the event that another user departs.

Transfer an employee’s content in seconds:

This might seem like an obvious feature, but for organizations relying on decentralized storage, or file structures that muddy who has control over what files, it can be a shockingly frequent concern. With Team Drives, everything stays where it needs to, ensuring that the changing shape of a team or organization doesn’t hamper users’ ability to get the job done.

Experience the Difference Now

With the addition of Team Drives, there’s never been a better time to migrate from aging and feature-poor on-premises file servers to a cloud platform that will provide you with all the tools you need to optimize your business and enhance productivity.

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