Google Drive Webinar

Download a copy of the Managing your Files in Google Drive slides. 

• Slide deck from Digital Office webinar: managing your team's files effectively in Google Drive (recorded Apr 2024).

Welcome to Managing your team's files effectively in Google Drive, offered by UCD IT Services.

In today's session we'll talk a little about the Digital Office initiative and what it involves.

We'll discuss some best practices about file storage and sharing in UCD.

We'll take a closer look at Google Drive, and in particular using Shared Drives to best manage your team files with a suggested structure for a typical team or unit.

We'll discuss transferring ownership of files in Google Drive, for example if you change teams or if you leave UCD, and we'll share some further resources that you can refer to.

So firstly to talk about the Digital Office, this is an initiative from UCD IT Services, providing a toolkit of resources to help you complete common tasks in in your online and hybrid office world.

So the resources are organised around three themes and it's time management and calendaring, collaborating and communication and file storage and sharing. So today's webinar is on the theme of file storage and sharing and you can find lots of resources about the digital office on our website ucd.ie/digital office or you can join our Community Space on Google Chat and the link is below.

So to get into our topic for today and talking about best practices for file storage and sharing in UCD. We'll look a little at the UCD File Storage and Sharing Guide that's available on the IT Services website, and to summarise Google Drive is the storage solution that we recommend for all types of information. So this includes personal data and confidential university information and for example all of the university HR data is securely stored on Google Drive.

Having said that, each individual is responsible for sharing and storing all files securely and we'll talk a little bit about the sharing settings in Google Drive.

There are some systems that are specifically designed for storing personal data for example Banner, Infohub and PeopleXD.

Some systems we don't recommend for storing university information - other systems like OneDrive or Dropbox. In particular we don't recommend at all that any personal or university information is stored on personal devices and or on anything like USB keys. So the recommendation is to use Google Drive and to share appropriately.

You can find some other resources about GDPR and data protection and from the office of the DPO at UCD and the website is ucd.ie/gdpr.

As I mentioned there's a full file storage and sharing guide which is available on the UCD IT Services website.

The link is below and this goes through the recommendations for Google Drive and Novell Drive which is still used in some places. It talks about storage limits, benefits and what the recommendations are for sharing and storing files. So this is a very useful document that we recommend everybody has a read through and saves.

So then as I said we're going to go in and talk a little bit more about Google Drive.

So Google Drive is our supported solution here at UCD. Google Drive is part of the Google Workspace suite and it allows us to store and save files in a virtual drive.

It gives us good visibility and control over access and it also means that there's less duplication: there's one file and various types of access to it, and we would recommend that you would send a link to a file and not an attachment.

So this avoids you know various versions of files being sent around the place and here, as in various other places, I will link off to Knowledge Base articles that advise you how you can share access to files and folders on Google Drive.

And I suppose the last point here is that you can share individual files, or you can share folders, or you can share entire Drives and we'll talk a little bit about how you can do that.

So talking first of all about the structure of Google Drive and what I'm going to do here is I'm actually going to go to Google Drive here in UCD. So, how to access Google Drive: it's available either either directly from UCD Connect. Click UCD Connect and you can find Google Drive for Staff, or you can go to your email or any of your Google Workspace applications and there's a little waffle icon up here on the top right. So if you click the waffle icon you'll also find the Drive icon and you can access it from here.

So this brings us to our Google Drive here at UCD and we'll talk a little bit about how this is organised.

There's a left navigation menu here, which gives various options for how files are stored, and here in the the main screen gives you know a list of files that I have recently accessed with the the owner and the location and you can choose to view these. You can see here either as a list or you can choose to view them as icons.

There's also a search bar at the top and this is one of the most powerful features of all Google products is the search. So you can search for individual files and you can also use the advanced search up here on the top right. So you can use this to filter down so you can look for particular file types like for example a PDF, a presentation by an owner and if there are particular words, the name, the location, the date, you know you can see that there's all sorts of fields that you can find to filter down and to find the files that you're looking for.

So that's our list of files and there's a settings field over here on the top right as well where you can go in and you know check some of your file settings. So when you navigate to Google Drive first you will see the the whole mic and which is where everybody comes by default.

The next icon down in the left navigation bar is the Activity.

So Activity gives you recent activity that you might need to take some action on. So here for example, I have an example of a file that might need my approval if I had any files that were shared with me that would require comment or you know some action to be done on it. These would appear here in in this list and similarly as well as appearing in the list you will get an email reminder about any of these files needing an activity or an action of something or a start down to them. The third option here is workspaces and workspaces is a nice feature where you can create you know and it's an individual workspace, an individual folder if you like and that you can create here for yourself. So I've created a demo and a couple of test workspaces here and these ones you create just for yourself so I'll call it sample Workspace for drive training.

When I create it and then I can add files to it. So for example I might add in this slide deck and the nice thing about this is that you can add in files that are belong to anybody else that are from any shared drive and you can add them into just your own little personal folder here that's available just to you and something to note is there is a 25 file limit. But it's a nice way just to organise content that you might need for a particular project or some particular purpose that's a mixture of files that are owned by you, shared by other people and in different locations so you can access them quite easily.

So those are the three top icons here, then going into more of what we're going to be talking about today you'll see an icon here for My Drive and you'll see with the little left arrow here that you can drop this down that there are various other subfolders beneath it and there are shared drives and again there are various drives here.

Underneath it then you'll see Shared with me, Recent and Starred and so something that we often talk about is what's the Drive? In essence it is your personal drive so this is a place that any files that are created by you will live here by default and you can set up a whole set of subfolders here as you can see.

The folders here that we've set up are Drafts, EAG training files and Personal files and they're available here in the Drive structure: so the top organisational level is a Drive (for example here My Drive) and the next level down is a Folder and then the layer underneath that again is the Files which are within each particular folder. You can get to each of these again by going back or by using the the break comes on top.

So, going back to My Drive - this is my own personal drive here at my UCD account and anything that I create here - for example if I click 'Create new' here at the top, I can create a new folder and a new Google Doc, Sheet, Slide, Form or I can upload a file or folder from my desktop as well into this. By default they'll go into My Drive and I can select whether or not to save them into a particular folder.

So that's My Drive.

Then the next thing is Shared Drives. Shared Drives are what we would use as a team or a unit or for a project, and it's essentially a shared top-level folder that you can share with numerous different people. The nice thing about Shared Drives is that you can have multiple owners for it as well or a group owner and this means for example anything as we said that in My Drive is personal to you - if you are to leave UCD your account is deleted and those files are gone - the files that are in the Shared Drives belong to all of the people that are the owners of that Shared Drive and so they stay current even if the person leaves. You can see here, we have some sample Shared Drives.

So I have the School of IT services Shared Drive, I have the School of IT services HR Shared Drive and I have a Test Shared Drive. It's very easy to create a Shared Drive and you can create one just by adding a new one here. All staff have rights to create a new Shared Drive and these really are the way that we in IT Services would recommend that you share content with your team/unit, and store and share your team and unit files. The nice thing about the Shared Drives is that you can have a number of members. If you have a Google Group, you could for example have one for your team, you can share the Shared Drive with that particular group and with a number of people. So I'll go into our school of IT services Shared Srive and look a little bit more into the settings and into the how it's organised. First of all, there's a little drop-down arrow here which I can check when I go into the Shared Drive settings.

So there are various things that you can do as an owner of a Shared Drive to configure the settings. The first thing you can do is to manage the access, so if for example you're working on a research project with people from other institutions, you can allow people outside of UCD to access files. Or, you can switch off that option and then nobody outside of UCD can access the files - this really depends on the purpose for which you're using the files. You would also need to check this box if you wanted to share school content with students as the UCD connect is a separate domain to ucd.ie. 

You can also choose to lock down the the sharing settings, so if you have content that's particularly confidential you can uncheck the option so any people who aren't Shared Drive members can't access the files. That means that they can't be shared or they can't even be viewed outside the members of the Shared Drive. Underneath that again you can change the permissions so you can allow content managers - and content managers is one of the roles - you can allow viewers and commenters to download print and copy files or if you choose to have this unchecked that means people can just view them but they can't download print and copy. So, as I said  Google Drive is GDPR compliant and it's what we recommend people use to store and to share files, but as you see here you can configure the access depending on the purpose of the the information that you have, so you can make it as locked down or as available as you wish. So that's the shared drive settings.

Next I'm going to click the drop down menu again and I'm going to manage the members so this is something that's important as I said and so we do recommend that you have a minimum of two managers of the Shared Drive. That means that you have at least two people who have the top level of permissions to this Shared Drive i.e. the top level folder, and and then underneath that you have to have at least one manager - we recommend two-  and then as you'll see there's various different access levels within the that folder again. So the content manager has access to add, edit, move, delete and share content, but they don't have access to update the people and the settings Underneath that you have a contributor, who can add and edit files but can't delete and share content. Then you have a commenter, who can add comments and a viewer who can only view the documents. So again, you have a very nice way of sharing the content with people as appropriate so you can share an entire Shared Drive with an individual as reviewer or as a commenter and you can also share more granularly. For example here you can see with a little personal icon here you can see that that means that that this particular folder is shared with some people that are outside of the Shared Drive. I'll share a little video afterwards in the links below and it's from a company called Damson Cloud and I think it really explains the granular permissions very well. 

So overall I suppose you can share the Shared Drive at various different access levels and again we recommend you have a couple of managers on the Shared Drive so here we've split this into what we think would be typical folders that a school might have. So, we have a folder for academic materials, a folder for administrative, a folder for projects, a folder for staff training and a test folder that we've set up. and it's very easy to create these: you just want to go up here to 'Create new', select a new folder and we'll call this 'example shared drive folder' and here, this is created automatically within my Shared Drive and automatically everybody who has the appropriate access within this shared drive can see this folder and can see the content that's within it. So it's a nice way of organising and your your content and you can see straight away up here that there's one group and three people who have access to to the file. 

I'm going to go up to the top level agai: as you can see we have a number of Shared Drives and there is no restriction on the number of Shared Drives that anybody can create and the storage limit is slightly smaller for Shared Drives compared to your own personal Drive. So for that reason and also for ease of sharing we would recommend that - we get questions sometimes about I have one set of materials that I want to share with everybody in my school but then I have one set that's restricted and what happens then if I grant people access to the Shared Drive - and so in that case, if somebody is granted access to the entire Shared Drive then that means that they have access to everything within that Drive. So you can share out an individual folder and an individual file with people who are outside of that shared Drive, but if somebody has access to an entire Shared Drive then you can't really lock down that content - they would then have access to a subfolder within it. In that case, what we would recommend is you maybe you set up another Shared Drive, here for example I've set up a sample HR Shared Drive, and this might be maybe you have performance reviews and P4G actions, various policy documents and that you don't necessarily want everybody in the school to have access to. In this case you can see that I have restricted this to two people: so myself and Aidan are the only people who have access to the HR information. 

Again you can set up your folders here: if there was a fun folder that we wanted people to have access to we could share that out with myself and I'll share with myself and you can see here that there are various access levels so I want myself just to be a contributor to this I can add a message if I want only members can access items of this Shared Drive so there you go and this just goes to show an example of when something is restricted and that actually it can't share this out any further so I would need to go in if I wanted to do that I would need to go in and I would need to change the settings and so again that's a good way I guess to to restrict down access and make it so that only the managers and only members can can access materials. So that's our shared drives and the limit for each Shared Drive is 200 gigabytes. And just to say that this is a sample structure that we suggest. 

Something I should also have said is that you can also check the details and you can check the activity as well that has happened within any particular files. So here, in my Achool of IT Services, if I look into my Academic folder then I've got it split down at programme level so sample programming and sample programme B and I can drop files in here or I can create new files at any time and something else that you can do which is quite a useful thing is to create a shortcut to to another folder. 

Ao for example here, my Projects folder, I want to add a shortcut to this so that I can access it from another Drive if I have the appropriate access so to do that.  I will go into my Projects folder here, I'll right-click on it then I will select Organise and 'Add shortcut' and then I can add a shortcut to that Projects folder to another location. That way I can just access it with with one click. So there are a set of Suggested Locations here, there are my Starred Locations or I can look to All Locations as well. So I might look here at my Shared Drives: I don't necessarily just want to add it to my Shared Drive though, I want to choose where exactly it goes. So to do that, I'll click the little right arrow here on the right and then I want to add it to my HR Shared drive and actually I want to add it at that level, so I'll add the shortcut into my folder. This person can't access the folder because of its sharing permissions, I'll add the shortcut anyway. Now, I'll go to my School of IT services and now you can see that my shortcut is here to my Projects folder. 

In this case, as I said, there's only two people in the school of IT Services: there's myself which is EAG training in this case and Aidan so it's only me that will have access to this Projects folder. You can see that it's a shortcut but what I can do, if I want to, as well, is I can rename it. I can rename it here so that indicates who can access it. That doesn't make a difference to the original folder name and but again it's a handy one, if it's in the scenario that you have certain materials in another Drive and that only some people will have access to, and and you can have it in another Shared Drive so that just makes the permissions clearer. Or they're having really granular sharing, you can add in a shortcut into the regular School Shared Drive so that people can can very easily access it. 

You can also  move files or move individual folders vs adding a shortcut. For example here, I have my Fun folder. While I'm looking at this, I'm thinking rather than sharing it, actually it might make more sense for everybody to access it. So what I might want to do with this one is I might want to move it rather than create a shortcut. Som what I'm going to do again is right click on my School of IT services Shared Drive and I can either move into that directly or what I'm going to do is click my little arrow here and see where do I want to add it into. So this isn't Academic or Administrative projects on the Shared Drive, I actually want to add this into the top level because this is fun stuff. You'll see you got a warning message here so members of the HR Shared Drive will lose access and so I'm going to go ahead and move that. So you'll see now it's gone completely from the HR Shared Drive so it's different to the Projects one which you can see here with the little arrow we can indicate that's just a shortcut, and it's still housed in the initial location, whereas in this case I've moved my Fun folder completely over to the School of IT services. 

So you can do that with an individual folder, you can do it with an individual file. If you share the document with other people, the link remains the same so you don't have to make any changes to that. You can also go in and click the Information icon you can see on the right pane here, basically details of who has access to any particular folder, you know when it was modified and opened and you can see the most recent activity: for example here you can see that I have moved this Fun folder to the School of IT services on the 22nd of April 2024. You can go back and see the history, so this is handy and also if somebody moves a document by accident, you have that file history there 
So that's it I think talking about My Drive and Shared Drives. 

Then just looking down very quicklyk I think people get a little bit confused about the difference between Shared Drives and Shared with Me. Shared drives are as we described, this shared top level folder that anybody can create and then you can share them with a specific group of people. Those files  that live  within that particular Shared Drive belong to the group, they belong to the Shared Drive. 

So, what's Shared with Me? is is it's a bit different so that is a set of files that somebody has shared with you: so somebody has gone into a document and shared it with you specifically. If it's shared with you, it's still owned by somebody else so meaning if they move it, if they do something with different with it, it can still disappear. And so it's a different thing to a Shared Drive. It's just a list of files essentially that have been shared with you - today, earlier this month and earlier this year. 

There's also Recent which is kind of as it says on the tin,  the most recent activity files that I've worked on today and earlier this month. And then last but not least a very handy function here is Starred.  Any folder, any particular file or folder, you have the option to put a little star or unstar it. You can do that by: there's three dots at the side of any file or folder and I can remove that from starred, so again it's that Organise menu.  I can unstar this because I've already starred it, so I can remove it from Starred if I want to. This again is specific to you and doesn't affect anybody else's view of the Drive. Again it's a useful feature and if you want to find things kind of quickly so this has always been here.

The Workspaces is a new feature is a more advanced version. So Starred is individual files, it's just a list of stuff that you might want to come back to, whether they're yours or somebody else's, whereas Workspaces is that little organisation of files, up to 25 files you might want to gather together and look at at a later stage. 

So that's it I think for Shared Drives. I will flick through these slides and they'll be available afterwards underneath for context and we're just going through all of the different options that we've discussed with the My Drive and Shared Drives and Starred, the different access types and how to manage members, and yes the demo of what we did. 

So the next thing we're going to talk about is leaving and transferring file ownership at UCD. 
This is a very text-heavy slide and I want to describe how you can do this.  As I say we do recommend that if you're using Shared Drives you don't need to transfer ownership. The files remain within the Shared Drive even if you leave and they don't get automatically deleted, whereas if you have a set of files and even if you've shared them with your team, you've made everybody the editor, you are still the owner if they're in your personal Drive. So if you leave UCD and it often happens, then those files you will be deleted. So before you leave UCD, our recommendation would be to move your files. It's just as we saw there:  move them into a Shared Drive or you can transfer ownership of your files. 

So to transfer ownership, there are a few steps involved and you'll need to use the advanced search that we looked at to identify files. You need to know that if you're transferring ownership of files that needs to be done at the file level, and not at the folder level. If you change the owner of a folder, it doesn't automatically change the owner of each file so remember that. You can select multiple files from your search results by clicking and dragging your cursor over them, and another caveat is that if there are shortcuts, you'll need to unselect those as well before transferring ownership of multiple files - we can't exclude the shortcuts from the search results at this time. 

Just to note that we should only transfer ownership of files to other UCD accounts and so this is specifically about you transferring files to hand over to a colleague before you leave, if you want to transfer your personal data to your Google Workspace account then use Google Takeout. You must ensure that any confidential or restricted data is not included when you're transferring data out of your university account. 

One last but but important note is that to transfer ownership of a file to somebody else at UCD, it must already be shared with them. So before you go ahead and do your search and find the individual files, you need to make sure that that file is first shared with the new owner.  

So a few things to remember, there is again as always a Knowledge Base article that goes through all of these steps and shows you how to do thos step by step and with some screenshots. As we say down here, we do recommend that you save the work in a Shared Drive and then you can avoid all of this transferring ownership, but this does come up, particularly at the start of the year. People move on from different contracts, so do remember to do this before you leave UCD because afterwards your account is deleted and we can't always we can't get the data back once the account is deleted. 

So again, we'll share the link afterwards. That's it for today I think . Going back over what we talked about, the main takeaway is that we recommend that everybody reads the UCD File Storage and Sharing Guide. We also recommend that you consult the university's IT security and GDPR guidance on the best practices around saving and sharing confidential information. There's lots of information available on both websites.  We do recommend that you save your work in a folder on your school or units Shared Drive in Google Drive rather than in your own Drive. 

If you're sharing files, for example if you want to get feedback and if you're sharing a document or a presentation with somebody, share a link in Google Drive rather than sending a file as an attachment. If you like having the folder structure on your desktop, you can continue to use that and there is a product called Google Drive for Desktop that works as a virtual G Drive. Again, as always, we have a link  to a Knowledge Base article with instructions for how you can download Google Drive for Desktop and how you can use it from your machine. Ssomething to note as well is that using Google Drive for Desktop or using Google Drive, you can use a Google Drive to store things like PDFs, images, Office files - it's not only for Google Docs. It is our recommended storage solution for all. 

And so I'll go back to to what we looked at today: we looked at the Google Drive layout, so we'll go back here to home, we looked at files and folders and we discussed that you can view by files or by the icons, that you can use the advanced search and as I said this might be particularly relevant if you are trying to identify files that you want to transfer ownership of. Then we looked at the left navigation menu: we looked at Home, we looked at Activity which is recent things you need to take action of, and Workspaces which are individual areas that you have saved for yourselves. We talked about My Drive which is your own personal set of files on the G Drive, we also talked about Shared Drives which are our recommended storage and sharing solution for schools and units. As we said, you don't just have to have one Shared Drive, you can have multiple Shared Drives and you could have one for a particular project, one for your team or unit, one for  a particular initiative. You can share and you can restrict sharing on the Shared drives with different audiences. You also have the other options here which are Shared with me: files that have been shared with you by somebody else, you have the most Recent files that you have worked on and you have Starred files which you can go through and you can star or you unstar files by going to the Organise menu. 

And there are a set of resources here that we will make available in the comments, and we hope that you have found this session helpful.