Google Drive File Stream...best of both worlds?
We have trained and supported around 40 organisations as they migrated to G Suite, with numbers ranging from 10 users to 7000 in the last 6 years.
Between 2017 and 2018 organisations began to implement File Stream (some companies moving away from Drive Sync). File Stream is where you can access Google Drive files locally on your computer, without syncing anything to your hard drive.
Before File Stream, most our clients didn’t use Drive Sync as it caused too many issues. Initially, File Stream also came with its own set of flaws, the 2 big ones being:
No file locking with Microsoft documents - risk of version conflicts with no warning
End users having ‘view only’ on files they actually had edit access to in Team Drives (try explaining that in training!)
However, we have moved on because G Suite constantly gets updated and improves all the time. Drive File Stream is now at the point where, even a Microsoft Office centric company could still live in a Microsoft bubble, but store their files in Google Cloud (and we will convince you on Google Docs at a later date).
This is because of the mentioned issues being resolved as follows:
New Team Drive access levels - anyone who is a content manager can edit files in File Stream
Real time Presence in Microsoft files - If you open a Microsoft file from File Stream it will notify you whether it’s ‘safe to edit’ or to ‘wait to edit’.
There’s a cool demo of this by Google themselves here
Thanks to the great Google Partners we work with, your migration to G Suite is always a pleasant one. But, we have especially noticed a positive difference with the new-ish and improved Drive File Stream.
