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Google has recently made changes to permissions in Shared Drives. We're sharing the best practices for setting up your permissions to keep it simple and effective for everyone! Watch the video below to learn more:
Setting up your Google Drive permissions is also a way of protecting your business data. As a G Suite administrator, you can control how your team share documents and possibly confidential information both internally and externally.
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Transcription:
What's up guys, Pete Moriarty here. I'm going to be taking you through how to get your permissions right in Google Drive. And so I'm going to going in through the admin panel and a bit of a framework for how we do permission, inside itGenius. Before we get into that, I'm going to share with you guys first, a bit of the foundational concepts of how we get permissions done in a business.
So in large organizations, they use organizational groups for their permissions. You'll have an admin group, you'll have a finance group, you'll have a, I don't know, a project management group, whatever. Right? And they trickle down into the IT system. And so if you are techo enough to have worked with a Microsoft service system called Active Directory before, you would know that what happens inside that system, you set up users and you put those users in groups. Then when you do permissions, you assign folders or Shared Drives. So you share them to a group. And then what that means is when you're onboarding and off boarding staff, and this is me putting my IT manager hat on, when you're onboarding and you're off boarding staff, basically all you have to do is put that staff member into the right group and they get access to everything they need.
Now, what those groups manage in a Windows server environment is not only folder access, it's also things like printers, it's things like logins, it's things like permissions, it's things like you might want to manage what is the desktop wallpaper for that certain group of users, all of those kinds of things. And so we've come from that background, being an IT business and we bring that kind of thinking into how we do permissions inside of the Google world.
Now, obviously you want to do it a lot simpler in the Google world. We want to keep things nice and simple there. So when we set up our permissions in the Google world, we don't have things like managing people's desktops. I mean, you can do that inside Google Chrome, but for the purposes of this, we're going to stick just to the Google Drive. But what is effective about that kind of thinking is the onboarding and the off boarding and keeping the permissions nice and simple. And what I mean by that is, when you onboard a staff member or when you have someone who's working in your business, what you want to do is just put them into one group. And then in that one group, they're immediately going to get access to all of the resources that they need.
But these permission groups inside of Google don't only work for Google Drive, they also work for your Google Calendar, for your Google Sites. They work for other resources that you want to share, like maybe a chat room inside of Google Chat. So pretty much anything that you can share to people inside of the Google world, you can use group based permissions to share. And what that does is it makes it really, really simple for all your permissions. They're always, always easy and well known. And that's what we're going to be using.
Pete, I've only got three staff in my business, or I've only got five staff in my business, do I need to go crazy with my permissions? Or is there a simpler, is there an easier way of doing that? And there is. The simplest way of doing it, and we call this simple permissions, is to actually use a small number of groups. And so the smaller number of groups would be, you could have probably four groups is probably enough for most businesses. So a simple set of permission groups might be, one group for owners and admins of the business, a second group might be for managers of the business, or you might have it like just the finance team. That would be a good one. The third group is all staff. So, that's everyone in the company. And then you have an optional fourth group, and that might be contractors.
So with those four groups, you have everything that you need to have all your permissions done inside the business. You've got your contractors. You've got your employees who are just like general employees, absolutely everyone. And then you've got your managers or maybe your finance staff. And then at the top level you have business owners or business directors. And that's the simplest way to do permissions.
The other way to do permissions is called complex permissions. And with complex permissions, we actually go a little bit more granular, a little bit like how larger organizations do that. And you'll see if we go into our Google Drive, I'll just go ahead and open up my Google Drive here, you'll see that we actually use complex permissions and by that, I've got lots of different folders for different areas of the business. And so every different area of the business will have its own organizational structure.
Now, the reason that we do that is because what that allows us to do is to be a bit more granular and a bit more fine tuned with who gets access to what. So that's really important when you have a larger team growing business, which we do have and you want to be a little bit more, let's say regimented in who has access to what. But if you're a smaller team, let's say you got less than 10 people in the business, just stick with the simple permissions now and then worry about going to more complex ones later.
We've now learned what are the different kinds of permissions? We've got our simple permissions and we've got our complex permissions. So now you understand, what are the two different strategies on how you might set up your permissions? Let's go to the next step. And that is, okay, if you want to go for complex permissions, how might you structure the business? And I'm not going to really go into too much detail on this, I'm just going to show you guys really quickly. This is something that we usually only share with customers, and that is Let me go and find it here. We've got a training in here on how to structure your company. Let me see if I can find it. Is it in Google Drive? Here we go. Okay.
And we call this the Genius Business Structure and this business structure is how we structure teams and how we structure businesses. And so this gives us a framework of organizing the business into different areas. Feel free to take a screenshot of this and you can use this if you want. But if you're interested in doing the more complex permissions, that structure is roughly how we structure the business. And then we obviously mimic that into our Google Drive.
Before we actually go and start dicking around with Google Drive, what we're going to be doing is we're actually going to be setting up groups inside our admin panel. And so the groups are the way that we're going to organize all those staff and it's going to make it really easy for us to then share things into Google Drive. We'll get into Google Drive in a second, but first we need to lay the groundwork. And that's what we're going to by setting up all the groups.
Now, if you're a member of our concierge service, then you can just list out the staff that you want to have set up into different groups and you can ping that over to our Facebook chat bot, or you can send that in an email to our team and we'll just get all those groups set up for you. Concierge makes it easy. So you don't have to bother doing that kind of stuff yourself. But if you want to do it yourself, I'm going to show you how to do that as well.
So you just head along to the admin panel, head to admin.google.com. That's how you'll get there. And we're going to go to groups. Pretty obvious, right? And here's where we can set up the group. So you can see here, we've got heaps of different groups for each person in the business. When you set up a group, so if you go create group, you'll choose a name for the group. So I'll just call this one test group. It will need a group email, although we're not necessarily going to be using it for emailing, we do need to actually have a group email. So I'll call this test group and it's going to be @mydomain.com. And then group owner, I guess that's going to be me. So let me put myself in there. Okay, cool. And look, here's where it gets a little bit like potentially scary. Don't worry too much about these settings. There's one setting that's most important for you. And that is to set the group to restricted.
When you set the group to restricted, what that means is that no one can automatically request to join, or they can't join the group themself because it's very important that when we're setting up these groups, that we don't have staff just joining them willy nilly, that defeats the purpose of a permissions based group. Right? And so what we want to do is we want to set a restricted group and what a restricted group means is that you're not going to have anyone just being able to go in and out of the group willy nilly. And so restricted group is the option that we want there. And then if you want to customize some of these other options, you're welcome to, but basically based on the choice that you choose up the top here, it's going to actually adjust these for you. So you can choose to go restricted group.
What I will sometimes do is tick view access, and that does switch it to custom. I'll allow view access in a group to the entire organization. What that's useful for as a business owner is, if you're not a member of a group, you might not want to be a member of the finance team yourself, if you've completely delegated that. Or you might not want to be a member of the delivery team if you've delegated that, but you might still want to see who's actually in there, or you might want to invite that group to a calendar event and allow it to expand and see who's actually in that group. You may choose to add your groups with the view access. But apart from that, I just leave it kind of as the default under restricted.
Okay. And there, we have this option here, who can join the group? Anyone in the organization can ask. I think that's a bit pointless if you're using this for permissions. So I would just leave that on only invited users. And we leave this one off, obviously for allow members outside your organization. However, if you're using simple permissions, like I recommended, and you're going to have your four permission groups, remember directors, managers or finance, all team, the general group, and then the fourth one is potentially a contractors group. Then if you're doing a contractors group, then that's when you would choose to tick this box to allow people from outside your organization to be added into the group.
So I click create group there and then automatically my group is going to be created. And then from there I can start adding members in there. So that's where I will add my employees into the group. And then once you're in the group, then they'll get access to the resources of that group. Okay, cool. I'll go done. I might even add a few people in there as a test. Where did that go? Did I lose it already? Maybe it hasn't shown up. Do I need to refresh the page? My groups disappeared. Oh, there we go. It's popped onto the second page because I've got too many groups.
Okay. Test. Cool. Let's add some members. Let's add some members into the group. All right, so we got Peter. Okay. So let's add Regina. All right. And maybe I'll add Scott as well. Add to group. Great. And I am just going to just go back to the group here, check that this is all good. All right. And I do actually want to make sure that I can view the members and hit save. Great. Okay. We have got that done. So we've got these done now. Let's move on to our next step. All right. So I'm going to skip through some of these slides here that we don't really need. Yep. That's all looking pretty good. Okay. Let me go back to my notes now. Okay. So let's actually get into our Google Drive and let's start setting some stuff up.
So Google Drive, pretty simple, right? You've got your My Drive, that's where you put all your stuff. If you've got it installed on your computer, using either backup and sync, or Google file stream, then you're going to have access to your files on your local computer, as well as on the web. Now I've got a Chrome Box here that I use as my machine, so it's going to look a little bit different to your Windows machine or your Mac machine if you're using one of those two. But it's the same kind of concept as Google file stream. I've got my My Drive. I've got all my stuff sitting inside my My Drive that I can access from the desktop. And if I was to double click on any of these files, it'll just open up those files for me locally on my computer.
We're not going to talk too much about those apps, but if you head along to our YouTube channel, we have more videos on Google file stream. And we have more videos on getting more out of Google Drive, switching from Dropbox, or anything that you might be interested in in those areas. So the key thing that I want to cover off is the difference between My Drive and Shared Drives because for some business owners who've been using G Suite for a long time, you may not be familiar with the difference between the two. My Drive is where you store all of your stuff. And you can think about that like a My Documents folder on a Windows computer, that's basically where you put your things, and by default, it's not going to be shared with anyone else.
Now, if right now you're using G Suite Basic, that's all you have access to. Only users or customers who have upgraded to G Suite Business have actually got access to the Shared Drives feature. And the Shared Drives feature, which was formerly called Team Drives is a very powerful sharing feature. I'm going to be taking you through how that differs from just sharing a folder inside of My Drive and share some of the most important features of that. But that's really the basic foundation of how we do all of our sharing inside of Google Drive using these group based permissions.
So I mentioned that it's called Shared Drives. Here it is. It sits right here under my My Drive and Shared Drives is where I have the individual drives for each different area of the business. And so those Shared Drives are effectively available for me to share one folder and share it out to certain people and share it in groups. Now, if you want to apply this same methodology to your My Drive, it's absolutely fine, but there are some downsides to sharing inside of My Drive. And what we find is many business owners have their Google Drive turn into a complete mess because they haven't used the Shared Drives feature to its full extent, or they're still on G Suite Basic because they don't know about Shared Drives and they're still doing things the basic way in My Drive.
Now, if you go to My Drive and you choose to share a folder and you know how to do that, you just right click on a folder, you click the share button and then you can share that with a group of people, you can share that with an individual person, really easy, right? That works fine. That effectively allows you to share the folder. And that person can access those files and they can access that information contained within there. But there is a very big problem with that. When I share a folder, and I'm going to open my demo folder here to give you an example of that, let me zoom in just so you guys can see everything here. Sometimes there is a file Oh, I don't even have any in there. Okay. Let me go back to my My Drive and I'm going to try and find Let me try and find some. Here we go. Cool.
Okay. So I found a sales guide, I found a file in my My Drive. And this file in my My Drive is actually owned by somebody else. So it's a bit hard to see, I'm going to try and zoom in even a little bit more for you guys. It's owned by agreenblo. And what that means is that someone else has created the file and they are now the owner of that file. Now the risk, if I share a folder in my My Drive here and here we go, I'm going to open up a folder here. This is a folder, I think this one is owned by me. Well that's even someone else's folder. There we go. That's someone else's folder and I've put files in that folder. So what happens for that person is, if I put files in that folder, then I own the files rather than the person who owns the folder. Let's go and look at English Content Pack. I have no idea what this is.
Okay. So this is something owned by Chris Prasojo. Don't know who that is. But basically, that one there is all owned by Chris. And so at any point, even if I'm the owner of the parent folder and I've shared that parent folder with someone, that person can delete those files and they disappear from my Google Drive. And unfortunately, we see this happen all the time. And someone will, as an example, hire a virtual assistant or a contractor. And that contractor will be maybe creating some design files for your marketing and they'll be doing a great job on those files. And they put them into a shared folder that you own, you own the shared folder, right? And I'm talking about in your My Drive. And when they put the files in there, they're still the owner of all of those files. And the only way to switch the ownership to you in My Drive is to actually make a copy. And that's a bit of a pain in the butt.
Now what happens is we fast forward three months, that contractor is doing a bit of a cleanup inside their Google Drive and they delete those files and then ping, files are gone from your Drive, they disappear, you have no control over them. So that's the big problem with sharing inside your My Drive and that's why I really don't recommend doing any sharing inside your My Drive unless you're the one who has created the file. If you've created the file, totally fine to share it outside your My Drive. But for every everything else, for all of your team sharing, all of that must happen within your Team Drives. And so that's what we're going to use Team Drives for, formerly called Team Drives, now called Shared Drives. And I'm going to take you guys through that.
Okay, cool. We've got a few more people who have joined us. Pete and James have joined us as well. Thank you so much for coming along guys. It's great to have you here. We are talking about how to fix up your Google Drive permissions. Okay. So let's go into our Shared Drives now and let me take you through how you get your Shared Drives configured. And so Shared Drives are the way that we share things with our team members. Let me go ahead and show you how they work.
So in an individual Shared Drive, I'm going to open it up, it looks just like a normal Google folder. You've got all of your bits and pieces, but basically you just have one permission and that permission is just on that bucket of files. Now, Google are bringing out the ability to share sub folders underneath a parent Shared Drive, but right now you can only share the very top level of the Shared Drive. Now that might seem like a bit of a hindrance, but also it's kind of useful to only have a very, very simple file sharing setup. And what that means is that you don't have to really worry about who has access to sub folders or sub sub folders. That's how things get a bit messy and I'm a minimalist at heart. So let's try and keep things simple. All right?
So what we want to do is we want to keep our files nicely organized using our groups. You will notice on the right hand side here that my Shared Drives where I've shared them is not with individuals. I've actually shared them with groups. And that's really the foundational principle behind how we do permissions and how we do sharings inside our business. That is to make sure that you're using group based permissions. You're not sharing with individuals. Because if you're sharing with individuals, then when you're onboarding or you're off boarding staff, you've got to go and run around to all the different apps or services and add them to this calendar and add them to this Google site and add them to this folder in Google Drive. And it can be a bit of a pain in the butt to get around to all of those.
But also what it means is it just makes it more difficult for your team to navigate because giving them a clear group gives them that assignment and they understand, Okay, I have access to X because I'm in the team group, or I have access to Y because I'm in the finance group or I have access to executive documents because I'm in the executive group. And that helps your team share files smarter.
An important policy and rule for you to implement is to make sure that every single person has one way of sharing files. And that one way of sharing files is not, I repeat, is not to go to the file and click the share button. That's the worst way to share a file because you don't end up putting files in a central, secure location where everyone can access them. What happens if you use the share button is you are basically just sharing it on an individual basis. And that's how a Google Drive turns into a mess.
And so if we have Shared Drives, we have clear groups where they're all set up. Then when someone wants to share a file with a team member, guess what, they drag and drop that file into the Shared Drive. And then they're automatically going to get access to that file or the right people are going to get access to that file. What that means is if you choose to go to complex permissions, which you don't have to, but if you choose to go to complex permissions, my marketing team is called the Attract Team. What we do is anytime I put a file in there, the whole Attract Team are going to get access to that file automatically. So it makes it nice and simple for everyone.
Okay. So let's go through our last little bits on how we link the groups into the actual Shared Drives because this is where it gets magic. And this is where Google's Shared Drives really shine. So I'm going to open up my drive here. I'm going to right click and I'm going to show you Where is it? It's called manage members. So it's not share, it's actually manage members. So in here we've got different levels of access to this folder. And so you can see here, I'll click on here. There's manager, there's content manager, there's contributor, commenter, and viewer. So we got a few more options than we do on the normal Google Drive. And the manager permission is kind of like, think of the admin. They can do everything. They can add and remove people. They can change up permissions and they can manage all of the content. Pretty straightforward, right?
Content manager is a great permission. What this level of permission lets you do is have someone add files, edit files, remove files, delete files, but not change the members that have access to the drive. So if you've got a manager in place for one particular area of the business, you would give that manager the content manager permission. That means that they can manage all of the files and manage all the information in there, but not necessarily add and remove people willy nilly from the folder. So if you want to have control over who gets added and removed from different folders, then you should be the only person who has the manager permission.
Now the next one, contributor is another great role. What this lets people do is add files and edit files, but importantly, not delete them. And let me tell you, this is the single most important feature of the whole of Google Shared Drives and it's well worth the upgrade from the basic edition of G Suite onto the Business edition of G Suite. The contributor role means that when you add someone as a contributor, they can put files in, but not take them out. And that is very, very important when you're working with contractors, or someone outside your business, or you're collaborating with team members and you have high importance documents, high priority documents that you don't want to accidentally go missing.
If you're an accounting firm, think about all of your customer job files and all of your customer's financial information. If you're in financial services or legal, all of those files on a particular job or a particular finance application, it's perfect for that. If you're an events management company, I mean, you're probably not running many events right now, but you'll have a job folder. If you're a building company, if you're a tree lopping company, anyone who has important files that need to be stored in one place, but not disappear or accidentally get lost from that place, you want to use this contributor role. And what that means is that files that go in are never going to come back out, unless, of course a manager or a business owner goes and deletes them.
Commenter and viewer are pretty self-explanatory, but this is where we actually bring the groups to life and they link in nicely without Google Shared Drive. So you can see the permissions that I've got set up here. Contractors only have the contributor role, so they can put things in, but not take them out. That could be someone outside the business, which is pretty cool. And if you've got a Gmail account, when you log into that Gmail account, the Shared Drives are just going to basically pop up there and let me I may as well show you what that looks like quickly actually.
I'll go sign into my second G Suite account here. This is my personal one. So if I go to Shared Files, this is a completely different account, completely different email address. From here I can see that I have access to different Shared Drives, but all of the files are owned by the respective G Suite accounts. So I have access to the Attract folder here, but the files are owned by IT Genius. So anything I put in there is automatically going to have the ownership transferred over to IT Genius, which is very, very cool.
Okay, cool. So we've gone through that. I've taken you through all of the steps. The executive team at IT Genius, you can see is the only one that has the manager role. So that's the one that can add and remove people. The Attract group has the content manager role. I have added someone outside. I should probably put myself in contractors, although I think I wanted an extra level of permission for myself, so I made myself a content manager on my secondary account. And you can see here our team group, which is the group for the whole company, [emailprotected], which everyone is a member of, is able to view.
So our marketing folder is viewable by everyone in the company. Any contractors that we're working with can put files in, but not take them out. Anyone on our actual marketing team can manage the content, move it around, delete it, do what they need to do. I've got my secondary Google account, or it could be a Gmail account is able to put things in and move them around as well. But all of that is locked down nicely.
Now there's one final thing and we're going to wrap up very shortly here guys. There's one final thing that you need to know about extra features that are available inside of Team Drives. And that is the Shared Drive options. And so this is the simplest way for you to have a little bit more granular control on what can happen inside and outside of a Shared Drive. So you'll see here that we have three options here. And so to get access to those, if you didn't see it, right click and Shared Drive settings. I can restrict, if I wish, sharing to people outside of IT Genius. And so I can say, Right, this Team Drive is not available for sharing outside of IT Genius. And that might be suitable, let's say, for example, your training folder.
So let me open up my team training folder here, go to my Shared Drive settings. Here we go. We have disabled sharing outside of IT Genius. And what that means is, I don't ever want to share any file inside this Team Drive outside the company, it's just not available. If I was to open up a marketing file here, here we go, I've got my slides from today. I can go to share and I can grab a share link. I can share it with someone individually, there's soon to be folder sharing. You can see, I can just click that link there and I can share that file with anyone. But when I am inside the Team Drive, let's go to team training. If I right click on something in there and I go to share, it won't let me share it outside.
So let's add my left pocket account. I'm going to go send. Okay, there we go. Didn't show me the error properly, but anyway, you get the idea. It didn't actually let me send it. It looks like there's a bit of a bug there. It didn't show the right error code, or maybe I see. That's because I've got my screen zoomed in way too far. But you can see where it actually completely locks down anyone from being able to access it there. Okay.
So what else do we have available? Let's right click, there's two more cool ones there. Shared Drive settings. Okay. Sharing with nonmembers, again, pretty self-explanatory. So that's people inside your company that may not be a member of the Team Drive. You may wish to lock that down. So that's important to lock down for Shared Drives for things like finance or accounts or for your executive folder. You don't want someone accidentally sharing a file out of there when they shouldn't be. And the final option that we have here is being able to restrict, download, copy, and print for that whole Team Drive, which is absolutely awesome.
So you can see here that the Shared Drives really play a really critical, important part here. Obviously, the groups are very important to have set up first, that gives you the structure of how everything works. And then the final point there is the implementation in the Google Shared Drives. So I'll take a couple of questions and then we will finish up here.
So Nick has said, Do I know when sub folder sharing will come in by any chance? It's impossible to manage client folders currently. That's a good bit of feedback, Nick. We have had a number of customers, particularly where they want to share a particular folder with a client and have clients drop stuff into a folder. We have that a lot with our financial services customers. The best recommendation for that is to actually create one Shared Drive per client. And hopefully you don't have like hundreds and hundreds of clients, but if you've got a small enough amount for that to be manageable, create one Shared Drive per client. I don't think there is a limit on Shared Drives. If there is, it's in the hundreds per G Suite account, but you should be pretty good to do that.
The folders are coming out very shortly. Let me open that up because I saw it on the blog. I saw it on the blog just recently. Let's search for folders. Here we go. Shared folders. Oh, it's in beta. That's right. Okay, cool. So let me drop this link in for you guys. Drop that in for you Nick. There we go. So I've just dropped that link in there. You can register for the beta. Can't promise you'll get access to it. But if it's in beta, that means in, I would say a month or two, going on previous experience with Google betas, it will be released to the wild for everyone. And so what that means is that you'll be able to share a folder underneath a Team Drive. Now, I don't know how the permissions and everything are going to work. We're not currently on the beta for that one, but at least you do have access to that there.
If you've got any follow up questions that you'd like me to help out with, please go ahead and drop them down here in the comments. I'll be more than happy to help out, but I want to share with you guys an important offer. If you are not yet a customer of IT Genius, maybe you stumbled across this group watching some of our YouTube channels and you came along and decided to be a part of the group and you are a current customer of G Suite, we have a free offer for you. If you transfer your license billing into IT Genius, you actually get a bunch of free rewards from our team. Not only will you get access to a consult with our team, so our team will jump on a call with you and do a bit of an audit of your account and check in on things. Don't worry, it's not a hard sale, it's just for us to see if there's any value that we might be able to provide to you.
Not only do you get that, but if you are billing your licenses through us, even if you're not a customer of our concierge service, just for putting your Google licenses through us because of course we own a small amount of margin, we don't charge any more for them, we just earn a margin because we buy it wholesale and we sell it retail. If your licenses are with us, you get some really basic help desk stuff from our team, which means that you can use our chat bot and you can make use of our Facebook Messenger for adding new users. And so you can basically just message our team and say, Hey, I've got a new employee starting on Monday, set up their email account. This is the email account that I want. Bang, our team will just do it for you as a free service.
And there's a couple of other perks that you get on that free concierge plan as well. So if you're not yet billing through us, if you're in this group and you're interested in getting a bit more value out of your G Suite account, absolute no brainer to get in touch with our team. And to do that, head along to itGenius.com, I will also drop another little link down there so you know where to go to get access to that offer. Please be sure to drop your questions down below. We monitor all of the comments on all the streams that we do and we will be around to help out. Until next time, take care guys. Cheers.
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