How do I allow others to browse my Google Drive folders?

Question

My company uses Google Drive and I am the admin for it.

I have set up a bunch of files and folders on my account and made sure that the default company policy is that "the default visibility for newly created files" is People at this organization can find and access.

I expected that the other people would be able to see my folders and files in the same way and same structure... that there would be one central location for everyone's stuff, like a shared network drive.

But that's not the case. The other people can only easily find the files that I explicitly share with them by going to the Shared or Incoming tab.

What am I doing wrong? Am I looking in the wrong place? How can the people in my company share one workspace for folders and documents? Or if that isn't possible, then how can I allow other users to freely browse the structure that I have set up for myself?

Answer 1

It is possible to have a shared folder among employees of your organization so that everyone can use it to share files with one another without having the need of clicking on the "Share" link for individual files.

From the Support Page regarding what the "Incoming" and "Shared with me" buttons do:

The "Incoming" or "Shared with me" view in the left-hand side navigation lets you see the files and folders that other people have shared with you, beginning with the most recent.

Your organisation can then share a central folder with everyone in the organisation and use it to store files that would be available for everyone. Individual users would then receive a notification regarding the folder that has been shared to them, which they can then click on it to be directed to a special page that previews the items located within the folder. A blue button on the top right of the page can be clicked to add the shared folder to the person's individual drive.

More information about the sharing of files inside folders:

Moving a file or folder from a shared folder into My Drive (or any other folder) is a move and not a copy, so the moved content is removed from the shared folder. As a result:

• Users will no longer see the moved files or folders in the shared folder.
• Any permissions on the moved content that were inherited from the shared folder will be removed, and new permissions will be inherited from the destination folder (together with permissions explicitly set on a file or folder).

Answer 2

Other users can view the files/folders in the Incoming section. They can add them to to their main section using Add to my drive option. The best solution we found is to create a Shared folder, have everyone add it to their drive and put everything in there.