Shared Drives at AMBS

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If all you want to do is create a Shared Drive, use the handy-dandy Shared Drive Name Generator to do so.

When to Create a Shared Drive at AMBS

• For a committee, team, department, or other durable group (like an annual event planning committee whose members remain consistent from one year to the next)

• For a project with an expected end date (like a task force developing a new policy or planning a one-time event)

• For documents that need to be available in an ongoing way to all members or significant subsets of the AMBS community (like procedures or forms that others in the community should use to request action by a particular office or department at AMBS)

When Not to Create a Shared Drive at AMBS

• If you need to share a single file or a single folder with a few people for a particular reason (like soliciting feedback on a proposal rather than collaboratively creating the proposal). Bear in mind: you might be sharing this single file or folder from within an already-existing Shared Drive.

• To have a dedicated place outside of your own folder structure for "the important stuff that you might need but don't want to see every day."

• To store your own personal not-AMBS-related work. (Among other things, this limits your exposure should AMBS find itself subject to legal discovery proceedings.)

A Tip for Organizing Materials in Shared Drives

Use shortcuts freely. Shortcuts are useful, especially if you have some things in a Shared Drive and other things in My Drive, or if you have one folder in a Shared Drive that's more broadly visible than the rest of the Shared Drive. Examples:

• You have some files you need to make available to the AMBS community. The files are at a variety of different places in your organizational structure. You can move all the files to a single folder to share with AMBS, and create shortcuts in the originating folder so you can find the files where you expect to find them.

• You are having a hard time remembering whether the files you need are in a folder in a Shared Drive or My Drive. You can create shortcuts in My Drive to key folders you often use in a Shared Drive. All your work of finding and editing files can be done in My Drive even when the destination file lives in a Shared Drive.

A Tip about Security in Shared Drives

Share according to the principle of least privilege.

When you add someone to a Shared Drive, they will have at least that level of privilege you grant them on every resource in that Shared Drive. If you share a particular folder or file within the Shared Drive, you can expand those privileges, but you cannot contract them. So when you invite others at AMBS to join your Shared Drive, think carefully about how much power you want them to have.

Bonus tip: only people who have a Google Account can be added as members of a Shared Drive (they don't have to be members of the AMBS community).

More Details about Shared Drives at AMBS