Looking for way to nudge users to create/move files to a Shared Drive rather than "My Drive"

[kevintoomey]

My org uses drive as our internal server and collaboration space for docs, sheets, slides, etc. In a high turnover industry, one of the most significant issues we have is file handoff, access loss, and missing files when someone inevitably departs.

If files were created in a shared drive, to begin with, this wouldn't be an issue. Drive training seems to go in one ear and out the other; everyone uses "My Drive" and shares every file as needed. 

Has anyone successfully changed user habits to start from the shared drive or consistently manage files?

Is there a way to limit or prompt users to move files into shared drives?

[jongunnarsson]

That's a pretty cool idea, I'd love to see something incorporated into the data protection part where a given condition might trigger an action of moving an item to a shared drive or something along those lines. 

[icrew]

Hi @kevintoomey :

A few ideas, none of them particularly wonderful:

1) I think that part of it might be to get most things into a Shared Drive in the first place--if everything that someone needs is there already, they (might? hopefully?) be more tempted to put other things in that same location.

2) Maybe providing people with a browser toolbar bookmark that takes them straight to the right shared drive, instead of just the root of Google Drive might help?

3) As you delete a user, it's possible to transfer their data to another user, perhaps a generic "holding" account, rather than some specific person? See https://support.google.com/a/answer/33314?hl=en#zippy=%2Ctransfer-important-files-and-data -- that'd at least help avoid data getting lost, and I suppose someone could go into the holding account from time to time and sort stuff into the correct shared drives.

4) I'd love it if there was a way to set the default for a user to be a particular Shared Drive. You might want to the idea to the Feature Ideas section here. Doing so will allow it to be upvoted by others and possibly considered as a future feature enhancement.

If you do not already have access, you need to request it first. See https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/custom/page/page-id/Workspace-Feature-Ideas-FAQ for how to do that.

Once you have access, go to https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/Feature-Ideas/gh-p/workspace-ideas-group . There, you can upvote and comment on any similar idea, or post a new idea.

If you are submitting a feature idea, be sure to explain the problem that you're trying to solve with the feature idea, not just the idea itself. For example, saying "when my users are trying to do 'A', they often get confused by the fact that the buttons to do 'X' and to do 'Y' look quite similar to each other, which leads to this unintended consequence" is far more likely to get fixed than a feature idea that just says "change the color of the button 'Y'".

Hope that helps, at least a little,

Ian

[bill_pier3]

We jumpstarted that learning process by moving commonly shared folders to Shared Drives.  The users immediately had to get used to going there.  Further, it was readily apparently pretty quickly that not having to explicitly share files and folders was a boon for most of them -- one less thing they had to fuss over!