Team Drives

Setting up Team drives for departments and faculties

Creating a team drive is easy but moving content across and ensuring it all works is the tricky bit!

1 You will need to decide in your department who has what kind of access view/comment/edit/owner? The easiest way to create a group for sharing access is to use Google Groups to create a group email address for the whole department so new members of staff can be easily added See https://groups.google.com for more information.

2 Consider the folder structure you have on the existing network drive and discuss with department - will it just be the same as existing or do you want to re-organise files and folders when uploading ?

As with moving house it is best to tidy up and throw out unused items before moving.

Some departments have a teacher folder and then a resources folder for files which are likely to be shared with classes etc. This means tests and other assessment materials are less likely to be accidentally shared. You may wish to keep the teacher folder on the network drive along with sensitive pupil information. All marks and personal details of pupils beyond Google Classroom progress sheets should still be stored on the Council network drive.

3 Back up all folders to a removable drive to be on the safe side!

4 Upload all materials to team drive(s) and use these as your ‘working copies’ with any changes only made to these files.

You may wish to keep the archived folders on the network for a few weeks but ‘hidden’ in a folder and set to ‘read only’ so any changes can only be made to one file.

5 After a few weeks of successful use of team drives you should be able to delete all copies on the Network drive (gulp!)..