Google

Team Drive

What can you do with Team Drives?

Team Drives are shared spaces where teams can easily store, search, and access their files. Unlike files in My Drive, files in a Team Drive belong to the team instead of an individual. Even if members leave, the files stay exactly where they are so your team can continue to share information and get work done.

When someone new joins the team, everything is one place and they can easily be added to the Team Drive.

Team Drive lets you specialize permissions based on who you would like to edit, comment, reorganize, and view files. By default new members are given full access, but this is easily changed.

Other cool tips!

➡ You can email all Team Members right from Team Drive.

➡ You can do a search within just the Team Drive.

For Teams

  • Team Drives makes on-boarding new people easier with a central location for all necessary documents
  • Files stay in Team Drives even if team members leave
  • It's easy to manage and share permissions of members
  • It is a central location that makes it easy to find

For Specialized Projects with Students

This should be used judiciously and only for projects that require a heavy amount of collaboration. Such as a publication or a large-scale collaborative project.

  • Easy to add team members and other users with various permissions
  • Files are located outside of the normal drive in an easy to find central location
  • Can add users that are only "commenters" for feedback but do not have any other permissions

Types of Members: Full access, Edit access, Comment access, View access

How to Use it

Create a Team Drive

  1. Open Google Drive
  2. On the left, click "Team Drives"
  3. At top, click "New" or right-click on Team Drive to select "New Team Drive..."
  4. Enter a name and click "Create"

Add Members and Set Permissions

    • Within the Team Drive, click the "+Add member" link

By default the "Full Access" permissions is set. This can be changed when added or after.

Change Member Permissions

Requires full access permission
  1. On the left, click a Team Drive
  2. At the top, next to the Team Drive name, click the Down arrow arrow_drop_down > "Manage members"
  3. Next to a member’s name, click the Down arrow arrow_drop_down and select a new permission
  4. Click "Done"

Star Important Files or Folders

Flag important files or folders to quickly find them later. Just right-click a file or folder and select "Add star".

To see all your starred files and folders, on the left, click "Starred".

Search for Files with the Team Drive

Search in a Team Drive or folder:

  1. Right-click a Team Drive and click Search within Team Drive name.
  2. In the Search box, enter your search term and press Enter.

Share and collaborate

Any files you put in a Team Drive are automatically shared with members of the Team Drive. Any member can also share Team Drive files with people who aren’t members unless you restrict sharing permissions.

Share Files

Requires at least edit access permission

Note: Folders in Team Drives can’t be shared.

Just like in Drive, there are different ways to share files in Team Drives with people who aren't members of the Team Drive.

Share files with individuals or groups.

Share a link of a file.