Discussion on:

Get started using Google Drive for document sharing

Slowly but surely, TechRepublic is starting to embrace the concepts of collaboration with Google Drive. Are you and your organization taking advantage of collaboration features like Google Drive?

Very Nice Walk-through. Appreciate it!!

Google Drive is sure and firm steps slowly come into our life. What if your site is ready for it, use what I use in chat.

Indirectly, this excellent presentation on Google Drive and how to use it actually makes the case for continued use of e-mail attachments as a superior method of transferring smaller files.
1) No training is required to use e-mail attachments.
2) Attaching is quicker than uploading then sending a link.
3) The recipient does not need a Google Drive account.
4) Attached files are less exposed to snooping.
5) There is no conversion from Microsoft Office formats.

Google Drive is good and is useful for sharing large files and for certain collaborative tasks, but it is inefficient and perhaps undesirable for other tasks. Use it when it is the correct tool, not because it is a new tool on the block.

Not sure about this at all. This is an extremely competitive market segment with lots of players investing considerable sums of money in product development and promotion but, as it is, this article is no more or less than a puff for Google.

There are lots of competing solutions - many of which offer far more functionality and with a better stickability track record than Google with its "here it is today, tomorrow we're going to withdraw it" history can.

There are massive players like Microsoft with SkyDrive and strategic solution providers like my company - see www.kahootz.com - offering much more "out of the box" than Google's (and Microsoft's) folder/file sharing.

While I agree totally about the inadequacies of email for collaborative working, I think the article might have justified a disclaimer "Sponsored by Google" and readers would be well advised to survey what's "out there" before plunging in with Google.

I am still happy with dropbox and nothing said here motivates me to change.

Nice little "War and Peace" Scott!
Google Drive is a great tool - they just need to cleanse the download process - have you tried to download a document without being logged in (anonymously?).

Regards

Thank you for providing much better documentation of Drive than Google has ever manager for any product.

Allthis sounds interesting but I am reminded taht ANYTHING you put on the internet essentially becomes public even if you set all the settings for the file to private. If I make the assumption that Google backs up it's cloud on occassion, then anything put into the Google cloud becomes the property of Google whether the writer/creator likes it or not.

Over the years I hae written thousands of pages of documents and have gotten actual credit for litrtle of it becuase of things llike what google does.

Strange that it only works if you use Windoze , considering Google's new PC the Chromebook, is a Linux PC

I use Google Drive to share video clips because they're too large for an attachment. However, there's now a way to "attach" a file using Drive when you're composing a message:

Hover over the plus icon at the bottom of the compose window, which will open the insert menu. (Remember, you need to be using Gmail's new compose and reply experience to insert files using Google Drive --- click the Compose button, click the "new compose experience" link right next to the Labels button at the top of the message.).

Click the Google Drive icon . In the window that appears, you can upload a file to Google Drive, as well as navigate to or search for files you've stored in Drive. For files stored in Drive, select the checkboxes next to the files you want to insert. Click the Insert button.
Gmail then adds a link to your message so recipients can click the link to view your file.

When you send the message, Gmail checks to see if your recipients have access to the file and will prompt you to adjust the sharing settings on the file(s) you've inserted, if needed.

Thanks for adding that!

Thank for this nice review!

I use Google Docs for many years now and I'm happy with it.

This is a correction to my earlier comment (the version I removed now): I first misunderstood the point about the google-account for users you want to share with. I missed that the emphasis is on the risky sharing with all Internet users. Indeed: I never did, but shared a Google Sheet with a group of users of which some have no Google-account at all. I used a link and their email-adresses and think that this is secure enough for > 90% of the docs i want to share.