We have been lucky enough to have used the Google team drives beta over the last few months in support of our bid to create innovative and modern teaching and learning resources as part of the TTLA funding from Creative Education.
As of yesterday the Team drives add-on functionality for Google Drive has rolled out to all G Suite users and I feel that this will be a huge boon for anyone who is already using Drive in education, or indeed business, as well as those considering such an option. Google Drive is already an extremely strong option for the education sector as Google has positioned itself strongly with products like Classroom and Chromebooks making their way into many schools and further education establishments.
Up until this point however it felt like a default choice rather than a great choice, it integrated well and made sharing as easy as Dropbox and hey, it’s free
It just felt like their was something missing and Team Drives now feels like a big piece of that puzzle. For those new to this Google Drive operates much like Box, Dropbox and other online storage systems on a per-account basis and sharing mainly via email address. Team drives changes that whole paradigm by creating centralised data repositories which feel more like a modern version of shared Windows directory. This makes it 10 times easier for staff to find the files they care about and given that anyone can create a centralised share and invite however they wish you don’t end up with the mess of root directories that plague traditional systems.
Plus most of the bugs were ironed out ion the beta phase. Looking good , looking good!