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AODocs Team folders – Why even bother with the Team Drives release

If you ever worked in Google Drive and collaborated with one or more colleagues in a shared folder, the chances are high that you ever encountered this: While working in this “Important Folder”, your colleague deleted or moved a file outside the shared folder into your drive. Result? Only the owner of this file could retrieve it in his personal drive and put it right back in the initial folder.

Pretty dangerous right? Especially when you’re working with documents which are crucial to your business.

AODocs – The extra security layer on top of your Drive

Google Drive offers a lot of great collaboration features that can turn your company all around. It does this by enabling new ways of working which can create a shift in your business culture. It definitely drives the necessary innovation to cope with the ever-changing environment we’re working in today.

But with great collaboration, comes great responsibility.

AODocs offers exactly the functionalities that you as a company can use to secure, protect and monitor your files and folders. And how does this work?

The ownership of the files and folder belong to the company

When working in so-called AODocs Libraries, you’re not the owner of the files anymore. Instead, the company provides Google accounts to store all the files, so the documents are now centrally owned by the company itself.
This results in:

  • Easier off-boarding of employees. Without the use of AODocs, all the documents would have been owned by the users themselves, and IT would have needed to transfer all company data to another user. (You can imagine the big analysis before this could take place…
  • More transparency. AODocs provides a tool to clarify on every given moment who has access to which library. So when the Sales manager wants to see which Marketing employees can access his Sales Library, he can just do a simple export and filter them out.
  • Security enhancements. As I will clarify in the next paragraph, there are some extra options to create that extra layer of security on the corporate data.

Extra layer of security and the administrator role

As the AODocs libraries are often department driven, AODocs forces its users to manage the libraries in a hierarchical manner. In addition to the rights that can be given in Google Drive (in standard folders you can give edit or view rights), there’s the administrator role in AODocs. Take this example:



 

 

I’m in the user permissions of my Sales team folder (AODocs library). As seen above, Jeremy and myself are appointed as the administrators as we are the head of the sales department. Besides that, we want to give access to every colleague of our department, and this is done by creating a Google group to make this permissions more manageable. So now, what are the extra options that I talked about and will provide this extra layer of security?

 

  • Disable the sharing of content. If we as administrators don’t want to have our files and folders being shared outside the Sales department (this can be for all sorts of reasons), we can just tick a box to disable this. If your sales employee wants to share a document with someone from to Marketing department, this request has to pass through the admin.
  • Disable the deletion of content. You don’t want to take the risk of letting your colleagues (accidentally or purposely) delete valuable content in your library? In AODocs, the administrator can disable this so only he can delete files when necessary.
  • (standard) Centralised bin in every library. Even if you allow your colleagues to delete content in the library, you still have the centralised bin, which gives you the opportunity to save deleted files forever and restore them when necessary.


 

 

 

AODocs – Why bother when Team Drives is coming up?

When you’ve followed the recent announcements of G Suite, you’ll definitely ask yourself the question why companies would adopt AODocs team folders and not just choose the option of the upcoming Team Drives.

There are still some functionalities AODocs Team folders offer which Team Drives doesn’t at the moment:

  • Open Office documents with the Webdav button. With just one click on the button, you can open office files in your locally installed office applications. It creates a direct link between the office application itself and the stored file in your Drive, so when you “Save” your file, it’s automatically updated in the cloud.

  • Use AODocs Libraries for Document Management purposes.
    When organizing your data, you can use AODocs to do this on a much more structured manner by adding Metadata or customizing the way your documents are displayed in the library.

Adding Workflows to automate your business processes. With the workflow functionalities offered by AODocs, you can automate business processes, define document life cycles and connect your business applications all together. Workflows and Document Management functionalities will be further discussed in detail by Julie in one of the upcoming weeks, so stay tuned!

Written by Thomas Reheul