October 8, 2020
Google has announced that you can now share folders in shared drives! Until now, all permissions were set at the shared drive level or the individual file level, and it wasn’t possible to share specific folders within a shared drive.
Important notes regarding this update:
- Commenter role available in My Drive: To align My Drive and shared drives access levels, the Commenter role will now be available when sharing folders in My Drive. Previously, only Viewer and Editor roles were available.
- Manager role needed to share folders: Folders in a shared drive can only be shared by Managers of that shared drive. Other shared drive access levels (e.g., Content Manager) are not eligible to share folders, because they aren’t allowed to control broad access to content. Folders in shared drives have the same access levels as the shared drives themselves, with the exception of the Manager. The Manager role is also required to move folders between shared drives and My Drive. You must be a Manager in both the original shared drive as well as the target location.
- Folder access levels can only be expanded, not reduced, from the shared drive level: Access levels assigned at the shared drive level represent the minimum level of access users will have to all files and folders within that shared drive. As a result, a user’s access level for a folder within a shared drive can only ever be greater than the user’s access level for the shared drive itself.
- Moving files/folders often changes content access: When shared files or folders are moved in, within, or between shared drives or from a shared drive to My Drive, inherited access to content will be updated accordingly, and direct access (i.e., access to a specific file/folder) will be preserved.
For additional information regarding Google shared drives, see:
- Google’s Store & share files or folders with shared drives
- List of U-M Google shared drives documentation articles
- U-M Google shared drives site
According to Google, this feature began showing up in U-M Google on October 6, 2020, but could take 15 days or longer to become fully visible.