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I am just trying to understand advantages of going to Team Drive for team repository on G suite vs using just shared folder on Google Drive. By searching different sources and doing testing I found the following results so far.
Frankly speaking this all makes me think whether Team Drive at the moment offers that much of advantage vs shared folder on Google Drive.
Questions:
1) did I miss anything in my analysis?
2) is there anything else Team Drive offers, which I did not mention?
3) Are there any other pitfalls (hidden problems) to use google Drive shared folders for team repository?
When contributors leaves the company, files they own will not disappear, if they were placed in Team Drive.
This however can he resolved, by simple automation, that manager becomes an owner of the files of people, reporting to him, who left the company
Edit access feature:
In a Team Drive you can have editors / contributors, who do not get permissions to delete or move files. Well, this is a good feature and clear advantage.
One gets the same permissions for all files in one Team Drive.
Since most of the people contribute to some of the projects in one way or another, for us this means that everybody would get edit permissions for all project repositories in entire company, which is not what always desirable
Not possible to manage access permissions in hierarchical way
This is a consequence of the 1st one. In google drive say regional manager can have access permissions to entire region. He would then create subrigional folders and would assign them to sub-regional managers. Sub-regional managers would manager only their folders, but would not see other sub-regions folders. However permissions of regional manager would flow down and they will automatically see everything. Sub-regional managers would then create sub-folders for individual projects and give access permissions to individual Project Managers
In Team Drive such construction is not possible.
File and / or folders cannot be in multiple locations This is really good feature of a Google Drive, which is missing in a Team Drive
Amount of subfolder levels limitation It is 20 now, but still, this is a limitation
Amount of items (files/ folders) limitation This is 400 k now, but still, this is a limitation
Links to folders will break. Links to the folders do not get preserved, when they get migrated to Team Drive
Disappearing files / folders
If there was a file or folder, which was in multiple locations and one of these locations was in the folder, migrated to Team Drive, than this Drive folder/file would disappear from other locations as well, not only from the folder, which was explicitly migrated to Team Drive.
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Shared drives are special folders in Google Drive that you can use to store, search, and access files with a team. Shared drive files belong to the team instead of an individual. Even if members leave, the files stay in the shared drive so your team can keep sharing information and work anywhere, from any device.
A shared drive (formerly known as Team Drive) is a shared space that allows teams to create, store, search, and access files anywhere from any device. Unlike files in My Drive, files in shared drive belong to the team instead of an individual.
End users: In Google Drive, in the left hand side panel, “Team Drives” will be renamed to “Shared drives.” Any desktop shortcuts that link to content inside of shared drives will need to be updated.
I can add something to your analysis:
Drive File Stream: it's a Dropbox-like app, it will mount a virtual disk on your system. Files copied/moved there don't take up disk space.
You can't share a folder, just singles files or the whole Team Drive. This is not something I would expect from an enterprise dedicated tool...
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