Google Drive and Google’s other apps come together to form a complete and tightly-knit ecosystem that can benefit everyone from average joes to CEOs, but Drive and its suite of office apps have yet to become a competent replacement for more developed solutions like Microsoft Office and Apache OpenOffice. While feature rich and usable for most things, the consummate feature set just isn’t quite there yet for most people. As a step toward remedying that issue, Google has announced that they are adding some extra sharing features to Google Drive. These features, however, are only for Google Apps users, a move which allows tighter integration of Google’s full service suite. System admins with employees running on Google’s ecosystem will likely find these new features most useful.
The first feature shown off is sharing integration with Gmail and Google Plus. If somebody is sent a Drive link or tagged in the comments of a document or file via a +, Google Drive will now notify the sender that the recipient of the email or comment is not currently in the sharing group for the file and won’t be able to view it, as well as give them the option to add the recipient and allow access. This feature also allows users to share files to guests of a particular event or members of a domain, taking a bit of legwork out of managing collaborative projects, planning surprise parties and the like. Files can also be made public, if the user chooses.
In situations involving administrators, an administrator can share to a recipient and their entire domain while prohibiting public access, or they can simply share the file only with their recipient. Files shared with these new features will, of course, be governed by the file owner’s policies. This means that if a user tries to share multiple files and one of the shares violates a local policy at the file source, Google Drive will only keep to the strictest present policy. While this could create some headaches for cross-department and cross-company work, it should ensure an extra degree of security and help to prevent accidental over-sharing.