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We have a corporate Google Apps account (paid), and we have a central user (I will call it CompanyArchive) that owns all of the documents that were on a network drive before we started using Google Drive. This is approximately 50 Gb of data, not all of which is relevant today. All this legacy data is contained in a single folder which I will refer to as "LegacyData".

This folder is shared with everybody in the company.

This gives us the following unwanted situation:

  1. Employees can only see LegacyData if they search for it. It does not show up anywhere else on their Google Drive.

  2. If an employee searches for LegacyData he/she can drag it to their "My Drive". Then 50GB of old data will start syncing, at which point the employee will usually freak out and do stuff like terminate the syncing, kill the Google Drive app, or phone an IT Guy.

  3. If the syncing is successful, employee will find an interesting item inside LegacyData, determine it should be somewhere else, and move it outside of the LegacyData folder. At which point all of the other employees will think something important has been deleted, and start freaking out and phone an IT Guy.

So to me it feel we went about this the wrong way, and our current setup is bad. I can't find any sort of best practise that will allow us to set up Google Drive as an actual company wide "network drive in the cloud". Meanwhile, the employees have started to use free Dropbox account to share documents, because they do not trust Google Drive. However, Dropbox for teams would cost us 1000-2000 euros a year, which is roughly 900-1900 euro's more than we pay for Google Drive. Also, the entire company is very happy with all other facets of Google Apps.

Question:

Who can put us on the right track using Google Drive as a company wide "network drive in the cloud"? Ideally every employee would decide for themselves what they sync, but they are perfectly capable of adhering to a few simple IT rules, as long as those work, and breaking of the simple rules does not result in immediate "Oh my... I deleted the company contracts folder" panic.

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For unwanted situation #3, can't you deny everyone the ability to write to the LegacyData folder? Just keep it read only? That way they can't decide to move things in/out of it. – allquixotic Jan 3 at 14:34
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Sounds like your using the wrong tool for the job. – Ramhound Jan 3 at 14:42
@allquixotic Thanks, we will keep that in mind. – dyve Jan 7 at 6:52
@Ramhound That might be the outcome of this investigation, but considering the number of users of Google Apps/Drive we are hoping there is a best practice somewhere with a much better implementation than ours, especially since it is supposed to be a file sharing solution. – dyve Jan 7 at 6:59

migrated from superuser.com Jan 3 at 18:34

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