Can my company own a Google Doc within Google Apps for Business?

Question

My company is evaluating Google Apps for Business, and it seems that one use case we desire is not covered: we would like to have Google Docs to be owned by the business, not by any one specific user. I see that one can set up a Site using the Intranet template, and use it to store/share (static) files, but we would like to instead store/share dynamic Google Docs.

For example, we would like to put a policy document up, which lives its life as a Doc that is modifiable by a number of people, with more people allowed to comment on it - but for a number of reasons we would like the ownership of the Doc to be centralized, and not associated with the author.

If this is not possible, do people just create a holding "user", and transfer ownership of the docs to it?

Answer 1

Unfortunately you can't use an alias (like everyone@company.com) to be the owner of a Google Doc.

You can however allow everyone in the alias to be able to edit the doc. To do this open the doc and go to:

Share > Add People > enter the alias > Done

Remember to send out the email invitation, since they will need the link to actually find and open the doc for the first time.

There's an easier way to do this if you are the Domain Administrator. There should be a setting in the Apps Settings Dashboard that will allow anyone from your domain to view and edit the doc. Again, this is not ownership, but it is a setting that can be made default so that any doc is viewable/editable by anyone in your domain (unless you specify otherwise). Check out this article for how to allow domain-level edit access to docs.

Here's a help article that describes how ownership and editor are different. I think for your case an alias that can edit the doc is sufficient.