Everyone wants to store your data. Dropbox, Box, Adobe Creative Cloud, Apple iCloud drive, Microsoft OneDrive, you name it, they want to store it.  Fine. One thing I won’t do here is compare and contrast different applications. I just want to encourage our staff to use a single one.

Since we’ve been using Google Apps for Work in our non-profit organization, (available for free)… it follows that we’re encouraging people to use Google Drive, because of the integration with the all the other Google Stuff, (especially GMail).  A few more reasons:

1. We use GMail, so once a user is logged into GMail, they are automatically logged into the company’s Google Drive when they connect to their folder, or access  it from within a web browser; no separate log-in is required.
2. Since any files stored in a user’s Google Drive folder are coupled to their company eMail account, we can ultimately control and access the files.
3. The user can access the file on any device or from any location.
4. The user can easily share files with other users, which facilitates collaboration irrespective of time, location or device.
5. We can create a shared folder hierarchy that mimics our network file server folder structure.  If users have a mapped drive letter on the old system,  you can create a similar mapping for the Google Drive.  For example, our “traditional” setup allocates Drive F: to the users home folder, and Drive U: to our “main” folder which contains all of the subfolders used throughout by the team.

Since we’re not a high-security outfit in terms of the data we’re working with, we acknowledge the preference for convenience and accessibility over the kind of rigorous control and security available when managing user files on a traditional network server.

Install Google Drive on Windows

You can easily drag and drop files to your Google Drive by accessing the drive from within a web browser.  However, there is also a small program that installs a Google Drive folder directly on your workstation.

Download the Google Drive application, and run it to begin the installation.

Once the application is run, Google Drive appears as a folder in your normal Windows Explorer folder hierarchy.

Google has a help center for Google Drive that describes most of the issues related to Google Drive.