Google Drive - Shared Drive permissions/inheritance?

[mikes]

Dear All, we are trying to set up new Shared Drives in Google for various staff tasks etc; our new Asst. Head has set up a shared drive however she wants various levels of access in the folders below.

 

So for example All Staff will see the Shared Drive in their Google drive, but various staff may not have access to the folders below.

 

However it seems (and according to the developers page https://developers.google.com/drive/api/guides/manage-sharing) - you can only set up folders like that in your own Drive, any Shared Drives the inheritence is mandatory - if BillyBob is given access to the Shared Drive then he will have access to any subfolders and files and that access cannot be removed.

 

However the head has said in their old school there was a setting that could be changed to allow this - a setting I have been unable to find, does anyone know if this can be done?

Or any other way of setting up a folder structure like we'd have in AD (various subfolders with various access) ?

We would set up separate shared drives for each subfolder but I think with the structure they want it would be hundreds of them

 

Thanks

[DGardiner]

Dear All, we are trying to set up new Shared Drives in Google for various staff tasks etc; our new Asst. Head has set up a shared drive however she wants various levels of access in the folders below.

 

So for example All Staff will see the Shared Drive in their Google drive, but various staff may not have access to the folders below.

 

However it seems (and according to the developers page https://developers.google.com/drive/api/guides/manage-sharing) - you can only set up folders like that in your own Drive, any Shared Drives the inheritence is mandatory - if BillyBob is given access to the Shared Drive then he will have access to any subfolders and files and that access cannot be removed.

 

However the head has said in their old school there was a setting that could be changed to allow this - a setting I have been unable to find, does anyone know if this can be done?

Or any other way of setting up a folder structure like we'd have in AD (various subfolders with various access) ?

We would set up separate shared drives for each subfolder but I think with the structure they want it would be hundreds of them

 

Thanks

 

 

you cant do that in google the way youre thinking

 

You can make a drive and enable sharing with non members - depending how your google is configured admin will need to change this setting in admin (we dont allow users to configure drives outside a default config), this allows you to share folders within the shared drive to other users and get this sort of access. but they wont get into it via a shared drive it will be the same sort of proccess as if a user shares stuff with another.

[haci]

Not that I'm aware of, from memory the default and only behavior is that if you try to change their level of access to be lower than their access at the root then the level at root will downgrade also.

Unless they have changed something recently I believe that still stands as true.

[jthompson]

I'm fairly sure that you'd need to not have all staff as members of the shared drive, but instead share the subfolders with staff as required. That ends up being a bit crummy from the end user perspective as all that stuff is just in 'Shared with Me', which unless they sort themselves out with suitable shortcuts, is a bit of a non-starter.

 

You could neaten all of that up as follows:

 

Have a shared drive that is storing all of the folders and files*. Membership of that shared drive is minimal (i.e. don't add all your staff as members): just the people needing to administer privileges on the various subfolders.

Have a second shared drive and add all your staff as members with viewer privileges. All that this second drive has in it are going to be shortcuts to stuff in the first shared drive.

 

Everybody has the second shared drive, containing suitably named shortcuts, and they'll not be able to drill down into anything that they haven't been given privileges on.

 

That's the nearest approximation to a classic Windows shared drive with granular permissions that I think you can get using Google Drive.

 

Edit:

*or you could have your soure files set out across multiple shared drives if that makes more sense.

Edited July 19, 2023 by jthompson