Google Shared Drives on the Cheap

The Problem - Google Shared Folders

All those monthly per user fees add up, especially for little volunteer organisation that run on the smell of an oily rag. Google offers some fantastic free tools for online teams, including Drive and Docs. Most small teams end up sharing files and folders with each other, thinking quite naturally, that they are doing the right thing. On the surface, everything looks fine, until you suddenly can't find any of those files that Maria shared last year before she left the team. The longer you use shared folders the more deleted files and orphaned files you are likely to suffer without even knowing that it's happening. 

The Solution - Google Shared Drives

Google Shared Drives (formerly Team Drives) is the solution to this. Ownership of every file and folder rests with the drive. It is clean and simple and operates the way many people (mistakenly) assume that Shared Folders operates. If you have an extensive set of Shared Folders then have a read about the migration process before jumping in.

The Price

Google Shared Drives comes at a price. You need a Google Workspace (formerly GSuite) Business Standard account - AUD$16.80 per user per month - about AUD$200 per user per year. 

If you are a registered charity in Australia you may be eligible for a 75% discount on Google products. But it takes a fair bit of firepower to jump through all the hoops to get charitable status and so it's generally not the little community groups that have the required status. 

A Cheaper Alternative

You can get your own Google Shared Drive solution for an unlimited number of users (who have free gmail/google accounts) for about AUD$220 per year. Google was quite okay with this when I checked it with them a few years ago. You can stretch your dollar further by sharing your Google Shared Drive platform with other little community organisations and splitting the cost (I haven't checked this with Google). Users will see no difference with this solution but it probably works best if you are sharing an IT admin volunteer who sets up all the drives for you. I will explain broad steps below (and assume that you are pretty comfortable using Google):

1. Set up a new Google Workspace Account with only a single user (the super admin). 

Choose the Business Standard version - AUD$16.80 per user per month 
Only one single user - never set up any more users in that account
You will be asked to buy a domain name (e.g. billblogs.com) that will be allocated as the primary domain for this Google Workspace. Choose something short and simple and general that you will never want to actually use for a website. It doesn't really matter what the domain name is because users will generally never even see it. For example, if your current domain is grannies.org.au then you might choose a new domain grannies2.com (as .com domains are often a little less hassle to setup and cheaper).
Make sure you enable 2 Factor Authentication (2 Step Verification). This is a critical security measure.

2. Optional - Set up free Google Groups for different types of users

If you have more than just a handful of people involved, then I recommend setting up some Google Groups. It's a little more effort upfront but it simplifies ongoing administration.The usefulness of this will become more apparent when we set up the Shared Drives themselves.
I prefer to set up free Google Groups rather than doing it within Google Workspace. Free Groups are independent of the Google Workspace account and can continue on, even if the Workspace account is closed. So, you need to setup the Google Groups from within a free Google/Gmail account.
The kinds of Groups you may set up could be things like:

• grannies-admin (a group containing the grannies admin people)
• grannies-volunteers (a group containing all grannies volunteers)

The Groups provide both an easy way of emailing all group members and an easy way of assigning access permission to the Google Shared Drives that you will create.
I won't describe the steps involved with setup or populating the Google Groups here as there are plenty of tutorials online.

3. Set your Google Drive App settings

In your new Google Workspace account go to your Admin Dashboard and then in the lefthand navigation menu choose 

Apps > Google Workspace > Settings for Drive and Docs

There are a range of settings that you can adjust here but the key ones of concern are in Sharing Settings, as per the image below to enable users that are not part of the Google Workspace to use the Shared Drives that you give them access to. These users can include free gmail/google accounts and free Google Groups. In particular, you need to make sure that "Allow people who aren't shared drive members to be added to files" is unticked.

4. Create your individual Google Shared Drives

There are plenty of online tutorials for the simple process of creating Shared Drives. So, the following notes are supplementary to that.

You can create as many Shared Drives as you want. 
I think the best way to do this is to think about who needs access to what files and then create each drive so that the whole drive and all its subfolders and files are only accessible to the relevant people. (The settings in Step 3 provide these defaults whenever you create a new Shared Drive). This is much more secure and easier to administer in the long-term as you know that any file placed in a specific drive is only available to those who have been given permission to access that drive.

This is where Google Groups are extremely useful, as you can assign permissions to individual google users as well as to specific Google Groups.

Shared Drive names can be long. Use this to your advantage to make permissions explicit to everyone. For example, instead of naming the Admin drive just "Admin" it is better to include all permissions in the name itself. eg "Admin and Policy (admin can edit, all volunteers can comment)" where you have a google group containing all admin volunteers and another google group containing all volunteers.

Unless you only have a few people involved, I think you are generally better off putting them into groups and assigning permissions to the Groups rather than to individuals. Then, when you have a staff change, you just update the group membership and the Drives look after themselves.

That's it - very general but hopefully it's enough to get you started.