Google Drive

Using Google Drive to Organize documents

For those customers who are using Google Apps, you may have seen the recent release of Google Drive (back in the Spring).

Having now used Google Drive for a while, my blog this month are my experiences with using Google Drive (versus the previous version).

So far, I find Google Drive functional for the way I work - primarily the way I organize my documents to be able to find them more quickly.

One element I find conducive to my work is the labeling of folders (previously labeled collections).  Because I have used the Windows Directory for many years, the nomenclature is more comfortable for me.

I have found organizing my documents and finding them to be more easy in Drive.  My experience is that creating folders makes more sense to me.  Also, it is easier to see which documents are mine and which documents are others (shared with me).  As such, I am finding documents faster and working faster.  I like that !

I am finding that, every day, I migrate more of my Microsoft Office documents to Google Drive. 

At Arden, our plan was to migrate off of our previous messaging platform (Lotus Notes) and off of Microsoft Office over a two year period.  We are about a year into the process and our migration is on schedule.  Google Drive is making this transition easier due to the increased simplicity of storing the documents in a directory like structure (similar to Microsoft Windows).

One difference is that we at Arden have several hundred shared documents.  We are moving them to our Google site.  That means that I, or another employee, has a document stored in a folder of our choosing.  When I share it with a co-worker, they can keep it in the main folder (called shared) or move it into a folder of their choosing on their site.  This helps me spend less time looking for documents because they are organized the way I want them to be.  I don't have to take time trying to figure out in what directory and in which folder they are stored in our Windows directory.  I prefer that.  Others may not.

My feeling is that this is the general move in the industry - to have employees take on more responsibility for organizing their documents.  For example, I believe that one reason some larger organizations are moving to another document management solution, Microsoft SharePoint software, is to push the management of documents down to the line of business level.  As such, managers are deciding what documents to store, where to store the documents, and to whom to give access.