Would you like to provide your team with shared online storage — a pool of storage capacity instead of individual limits? This is a need that Dropbox for Teams seems to address pretty well, but Google Drive doesn’t handle yet.
Clearly, when you consider the complete value proposition presented by Google Apps, there is a lot to argue in favor of Google Drive. However, it can be an administrative hassle to manage the storage requirements of a team when Google Drive only treats them as individuals – no shared online storage to manage centrally.
It wouldn’t surprise us if Google rolled out a solution to this in Google Apps for Business — allowing for a shared online storage pool. In the meantime, we outline a work-around below that will give you a little more central control.
Creating Shared Online Storage for Your Domain in Google Apps
First, login as the Google Apps admin for your domain to create a new user. For example “storage@yourdomain.com.” This new user will have 5.0 GB of storage available by default, just like other users. You will have to login to this new account to activate it.
Next, purchase additional storage for this storage@ user up to whatever capacity you desire. This step can also be done later – simply expand storage as required.
Train your users to do the following in order to make use of the available Google Drive storage for this new account:
- Upload files to their individual drive accounts as they normally would
- Share files with the storage@ account that they wish to transfer out of their drive (see screenshot below).
- Once the storage@ account is among the users with access to the file, it is necessary to transfer ownership of the file to the storage@user (in order to have it count toward the storage@ space quota instead of the original creator). See screenshot below.
If your organization wishes to use the Google Drive Desktop Sync, you can give your users the login password to the storage@ account and ask them to login to Google Drive Desktop Sync with these credentials instead of their personal ones.
