On this page
- Create a shared drive for each project or team
- Share content responsibly
- Manage membership with groups
- Use naming conventions in shared drives
- See only the shared drives you want
- Change your shared drive theme
- Find files in a shared drive by owner
- Restrict folders to specific members
Create a shared drive for each project or team
Give each shared drive a clear focus or purpose. If the files are for a variety of projects or spread across several different teams, create multiple shared drives. This approach also helps you define member access based on that purpose. For example:
- If the shared drive is an active space for collaboration, give members Content manager access or Contributor access so they can update content.
- If the shared drive is a repository for a completed project or final content, give members Commenter or Viewer access so content can’t be changed. You might also want to change the shared drive name to indicate its status, such as [Archive] or [Reference].
If there’s disagreement about organization, there may be too many projects and teams using the shared drive. You might reorganize the shared drive into 2–3 new ones:
- One shared drive solely containing the “shared” content, representing a cross-functional project team
- One (or more) shared drives for the specific content for each of the functional teams
Learn how at the Google Drive Help Center
Share content responsibly
For people or groups who need access to all the files and folders in a shared drive, add them as members with the appropriate access level. If possible, give collaborators Manager or Content manager access so they aren’t limited in how they work together in the shared drive.
- Support collaborators on Google Drive for desktop–If your collaborators use Drive for desktop to access non-Google files (such as an Adobe PDF or Microsoft Office file), give them Content manager access.
Note: Members with Contributor access can still make edits offline on their desktop and then upload updated versions without Drive for desktop. Refer to See who changed what.
- Use separate shared drives to control access–In some cases, you might want to have more than one shared drive for the same project if you have distinct groups of collaborators with different access needs. For example, if you’re working on a project with an external agency. Create a shared drive for internal team members and a separate shared drive for internal and external collaborators. This way, you can prevent external members from accessing internal-only content.
- Use file sharing for limited access–If someone needs access to only a certain file or folder in a shared drive, you can share only that item rather than making them a member. Only Managers can share folders in shared drives.
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Manage membership with groups
Groups can make shared drive membership easier to manage, because when someone is added to a group, they get membership to the shared drives the group is a member of. This approach has 2 main benefits:
- New group members get the same access to files and folders in shared drives as existing group members. You don’t have to worry whether they have access or not.
- It increases your shared drive membership capacity. If you add shared drive members individually, you can add only 600 people. Using groups, you can add up to 100 groups and up to 50,000 people.
Use naming conventions in shared drives
To help people find shared drives and avoid naming conflicts in shared drives, agree on organization-wide naming conventions. For example:
- Your company has sales divisions in different regions and you create a shared drive for each sales region. To differentiate the shared drives, prefix them with the region or an abbreviation of the region.
- You can indicate status by adding a prefix, such as [Archive] to a project that’s no longer active or [In Progress] to a project that’s active.
- To distinguish between shared drives that are shared externally and internally, add the prefix [External] or [Internal].
See only the shared drives you want
Over time, you might be added to several shared drives. You can hide a shared drive that’s part of a completed project or if you want to prioritize other shared drives. If you do, you still have access to it and your permissions don’t change. You can unhide a shared drive at any time.
Examples
- You’re a member of a shared drive that was created for a project, but the work is complete and you don’t need to see the shared drive anymore.
- You’ve been added to lots of shared drives, but you only use some of them, so you want to make them easier to find.
- You’re a member of a shared drive, but the content isn’t relevant to your work.
- You hid a shared drive that you didn’t need, but you want to be able to see it again.
- You want to find content in a shared drive after you’ve hidden it.
Change your shared drive theme
Find files in a shared drive by owner
If you’re looking for a file that you didn’t create in a shared drive with a lot of members, searching by team member can take some time. However, if you know who created the file, you can search by creator to easily find it.
Restrict folders to specific members
If you want to keep some sensitive information private, you can use limited-access folders in shared drives to control who can see the content inside the folder. With limited access, only those with Manager access to the shared drive and people you directly add to the folder can open it and access its content. Other members of the shared drive can see the folder's name, but they can't open it unless they get access.
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