Definition
Google Drive is a cloud-based file storage provided by Google which is totally free for use if the storage usage is under 15GB. You can regard it as a storage of your hard drive in your laptop, except that the storage is stationed in the Cloud instead of your laptop..
Problem Patterns that Google Drive solves
Files needed to be stored in mutli-location and multi-device
By storing the file into Google Drive (i.e. the Cloud Drive) , you can access the file in any device including laptop , desktop or even mobile phone. As long as you have access to the internet, you can use any browser to login to Google Drive and access the storage.
This is a common scenario where you have saved a important Powerpoint file in the laptop in your home but in the morning you forgot to copy that Powerpoint file from your laptop to the USB drive, which eventually you failed to use the file to do the presentation.
Different roles need different access rights level for different files in the storage
Imagine a scenario that when you are working for a project with your client, you want to share only one of the files in the storage, while keeping the vendor quotation files away from your client.
Another scenario is that you want to only share the company profile .pdf file to your client for reading and don’t want them to have the rights to delete the file.
This capability is what we called Role Based Access Control🛈, which is one of the features of Google Drive.
Company’s Files scattered around different local storage
Imagine if you have 30 staff in your company and everyday they work very hard to do their jobs via their laptop. One day , you have a very important sales pitch which drives you to gather all the past job references from your colleague. While you may need to get the Social Media Ads Image Ads from a designer, you also need to go for the programmer to ask for the wideframe of the website. Without luck, the programmer who created the wideframe just quit last week without leaving any clue where he stored the wideframe which he created 2 years before.
If this scenario sounds familiar to you, it is time for you to think of using Google Drive to centralise all the important files and documents to save the time of searching.
Scenario of using Google Drive
Sharing files to your client by Role Based Access Control
Step By Step
- Determine the hierarchy level that you want to share in the Google Drive
As said before, Google Drive is no different than any of the File Manager in your laptop computer, except that the files inside the Google Drive are stored in a cloud harddisk, while the Files accessed by your File Manager of your laptop are saved in your local laptop harddisk.
Therefore , both of them are using the same tree hierarchy to locate the files. Allow me to illustrate the File Manager Hierarchy with the example below:
Your Company Google Drive File System Hierarchy
- Google_Drive_Root
- Human_Resource (Folder)
- Accounting (Folder)
- Client (Folder)
- 00_Alice_Ltd (Folder)
- 01_Facebook_Post_Image.png (File)
- 02_Facebook_Post_Text.docx (File)
- 03_Alice_Quotation.pdf (File)
- 04_Vendor_Invoice.pdf (File)
- 05_Billy_Company_Ltd (Folder)
- 00_Alice_Ltd (Folder)
In this example, as the Project Manager of Alice Ltd, you may probably want to share the whole Folder of Alice Ltd (i.e. 00_Alice_Ltd) to your Assistant Digital Marketing Manager , Sam, but not Billy Company Ltd (05_Billy_Company_Ltd), which Sam has no time to manage.
Meanwhile, you may want your Digital Marketer to access only the Image (01_Facebook_Post_Image.jpg) and Text file (02_Facebook_Post_Text.docx) , and you don’t want him to access the Quotation to Alice Ltd which contains the selling price of the Project.
In this case, to share the Whole Folder of 00_Alice_Ltd to Sam (Assistant Digital Marketing Manager), you can :
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