Google Drive is growing up a little bit today. At its
enterprise-focused Cloud Next conference, Google is announcing a set of
changes that will make the product more palatable for businesses — and
potentially more interesting for regular consumers as well.
The top of the new feature list starts with “Team
Drives,” which amounts to a shared cloud folder that employees can put
their files into. That’s something you can do now, but the permission
and ownership structure on those files can get kind of hairy pretty
quickly: if somebody leaves the company, their files might disappear.
Team Drives ensures everybody with access to the folder is essentially a
“co-owner” of the files.
There are a couple other enterprise announcements, Google
is making its “Vault” feature more widely available, which makes it
easier for administrators to manage and export Google Drive data. It has
also acquired AppBridge, a company that helps companies migrate to
Google Cloud from Sharepoint, or whatever else they might be using. Now
Google will offer those consulting services directly.
That’s
the main business-focused feature. For consumers, the most interesting
new feature is something Google calls “Drive File Stream.” Essentially,
it’s designed to make it easier for you to choose to install Google
Drive on your PC or Mac, because it won’t download all of your
files — instead it will try to intelligently guess which ones you need
and make the rest available on-demand. It’s similar to Dropbox’s “Smart Sync” feature. Unfortunately, it’s only available as part of Google’s “early adopter program.”
The other consumer feature is something called “Quick
Access” and was previously only available on Android. Here, Google
basically tries to predict what file you’re looking for when you open up
Drive and then present it to you on the main screen before you search
for it.
None of these things are precisely revolutionary features
— and in the case of Drive File Stream in particular, it feels like
table stakes. But taken together, they show that Google is perhaps
getting serious about developing the G Suite again. Starting with some
of the biggest pain points is a good idea — the precise details of file
ownership and storage on your PC are the kinds of things that you don’t
want
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