Google Drive

Pros

I like most that you can use Google drive for file saving and sharing from any location in US and internationally. Our business has multiple locations in US and internationally. I work in finance and part of finance team work from multiple international offices. My international team members can save files in the same Google drive regardless of location. It is easy to share and see files immediately.

I can also create separate groups and share files only within those groups. I can include all or only designated individuals in each of the group. Managing access is very easy and helps confidentiality.

I also like that it is very easy to share files outside of organization. It is very simple to add email address of outside party and give it access to the folder. As a result, no additional work is required.

All our files are backed-up on Google drive. I love it. Sometimes, laptop can get damaged, especially during business trips, but I can still access all my files on new desktop without additional work or efford.

I also like that it is very easy to access files from home or during business trips. I don't need to call server or establish a connection to the server. I simply login into my Google email and access Google drive with all files. This saves time.

Cons

I love Google drive and I believe it is essential for our international business. The only one area of improvement that I would recommend is to make replication to hard drive easier and more simultaneous. When we try to replicate automatically, sometimes, we see conflicting versions and replication is not real time. So, it is better to see files on Google drive (Internet), rather than replica on hard drive. This is not a big deal as I can always work online on Google drive and download my files to Google drive myself.

Pros

What did we do before products like Drive? We rummaged for files on our desktop, sent a thousand emails to colleagues looking for information, and lost documents in a shuffle of unorganized madness.

Drive makes it easy to store and collaborate on files within your organization and outside of it.

- The "search" feture within Drive is accurate and useful, easily and accurately identifying the content I'm looking for. As long as you use clear, identifiable titles on the items in your Drive, you will find what you're looking for in less than 5 seconds. No rummaging around on your hard drive or desktop for files, no emails back and forth to other departments to look for something.

- If I need to share a Doc or a Sheet with a client for approval or collaboration, I can easily identify what level of permission I am offering them: editing or viewing. It keeps me from accidentally letting someone edit a document who shouldn't have access to it.

- It is very reliable. I never experience glitching or accidentally losing content due to software malfunction (an issue I've had with competitive software).

- The layout of the applications within Drive (Sheets, Docs, etc.) are intuitive and easy to navigate. I feel confident even my mostly computer illiterate 68 year old mother could handle navigating Drive and utilizing it well.

- It has a clean, modern appearance that helps me feel less stressed when I'm looking for files.

- The color scheme is pleasant.

Cons

Even the most brilliant products have ways they can improve.

1. While Drive offers an easy launch pad into other applications like Sheets and Docs, there is not an easy way to navigate back to Drive once you're in a spreadsheet or a document.

The link in the top left corner will take you back to the Sheets homepage, but not to Google Drive. For that, you have to do a few extra clicks or utilize a bookmark.

In our company, we constantly hop back and forth between Sheets and Docs, so I wish there was an easier way to go back to the parent Drive page.

2. The second area for possible improvement is the permissions section. When I want to share a script with a client outisde of our organization for them to make edits to, I have to make 6 clicks. For an action that I frequently do, that's a lot.

There are less clicks required if you're sharing to someone within your organization, but I find that useless as each member on our team already has access to all of our company files and doesn't need a special link for sharing purposes.

Pros

I love that Drive has made it so convenient to have files and data at your disposal at any given time. All you need is an internet device. I like that all the drive is easily navigatable and the thumbnails is an added advantage. Absolutely been loving the drag and drop feature since it came. A well-thought list of features which makes things so easy and fast to use, access and download. Like the activity tab which helps in retrieving files easily for repeated use. Love the work space feature to share files among specific groups, making things lot easier and efficient.

Cons

The first thing comes to my mind, when it comes to demerits is the fact that some time uploading or downloading content feels clumsy, much to blame the internet speeds I guess, Would like if the file thumbnails are a bit bigger would make things easier when you are scrolling to look for a specific file visually. Would like if the Data meter also displayed some more key features like a pie chart with different type files with data properties. Same applies to the drive itself if searching for a file could be different from the list or thumbnail to something more ergonomic would make the user experience much more delightful.from the conventional list.

Pros

Google Drive is reliable and absolutely scalable with paid plans going from 100GB to 30TB, suiting the storage needs of the vast majority of customers. It requires no initial setup, not even on Android phones where it shines brightly thanks to the fact that it manages automatic backups of users' data, storage device settings and application cache. It also integrates well with a multitude of Android applications which also offer the ability to store backups on Google Drive (such as the ubiquitous WhatsApp application). It works offline, it has plenty of keyboard shortcuts to move around efficiently, it integrates really well with other Google products such as Google Drawing and Google My Maps and it can even be connected with more online applications, including Geogebra for mathematics or MindMeister to create mind maps. As with most Google products, it comes with a powerful search box that allows to search files by type, by owner, by date modified or with specific keywords, among other filters. There are many additional features available when right-clicking on files and folders to create copies, download the file or folder and options to share with other people. Sending emails with large attachments within Gmail becomes extremely easy too, as Gmail will ask to use Google Drive when the attachments are deemed too big. Most files can be opened natively with Google tools: images, PDF documents, Google maps and spreadsheets, saving time and hassle when on the move.

Cons

Google Drive doesn't work like a full-fledged file manager, which makes it harder to quickly organize files and folders. You can drag and drop items around, but there is no way to have split views of different folders side-by-side. There is no official Linux client to work with, which means there are many third-party solutions available: some being free and either overly complex or too simple; some better options being non-free. For this reason, there is no simple way to freely synchronize only chosen files and folders on Linux unless one is going to trust a commercial third-party company or willing to work from the terminal. Google Drive integrates with other Google products such as Calendar, Keep and Tasks, but you cannot directly include or browse files from within those apps, so one has to go back and forth or just reference shareable links that need to be created from Google Drive. Again, because there is no Linux client available, those actions can't be perform without having to access Google Drive from a web browser, which is something many other software offer right out of the box (Dropbox and pCloud being great examples, where Dropbox even has a command-line interface that allows shareable links to be created without even having opened the client). Even when those shortcomings can be overcome, Google Drive is actually slower when synchronizing than other mainstream services, making it less practical to transfer very large amount of data in one single session.

Pros

Google Drive has great features and for most users the main feature comes down to, how easy it is to share and collaborate day to day work through this platform. I also like that my google drive account is directly associated to my gmail account so I do not have to login separately. This means one does not have to create separate accounts and remember two pieces of information. It allows you to share files and folders individually to specific people hence making the experience custom and flexible. All the shared files and folders can be accessed by any of the shared account holders, all at the same time and edit them simultaneously. This is just great as one user doesn't have to logout for other to edit the same file. Also the best thing is every user can see what the the other person is editing in real time. There is history of the edits that is being tracked as well so going back to what changed and by whom could sometimes come in very handy. The most used collaborative applications are word, excel and powerpoint in the industry today. Google drive have its own version of those format available to use so what's not to like.

Cons

The space limitation on google drive is a little annoying. I use google drive for personal use as well to share pictures, videos and other such things to family members. Adding videos and pics to google drive can severely cut down the storage space which is only 15GB. In today's world, good quality pictures and videos can easily pass that storage size. Very basic file types are supported by Google Drive such as docx, xlsx, pptx, pdf, joeg and so on. I think they should expand that and keep their library growing which hasn't happened yet. I do not like the layput of google drive and I their UI needs to be revamped and upgraded. It's pretty clunky at the moment.