I spend a fairly large amount of time each week working in Google Documents. Since I share multiple documents with the different groups of people for different projects, I was delighted to learn today that Google Docs now permits “Folder Sharing.” After you create a folder in Google Docs, right click (control click on a Mac) and specify the folder access rights you want to provide to others, just like you do now when sharing a single document. Then:
To add items to your shared folders, you can drag the doc from your Docs list to the folder (it’s listed in the navigation pane on the left of your docs). You can also select the checkbox next to the item in question and click the folder from the Folders drop-down menu.
Sharing a folder with someone is an easy way to give someone access to the docs within your folder. Just click My folders in the navigation pane on the left of your docs, select the folder you’d like to share, click the Share drop-down menu, and select Invite people…
This is a GREAT functionality addition to Google Documents, since this streamlines the process of sharing multiple documents with the same group. Be aware that access rights for documents within the shared folder will be the SAME for each user. This means if you grant someone edit rights to the folder, they will have edit rights to ALL the documents in the folder, you can’t make a single document in the folder simply read-only for that user and leave the rest as editable.
I’d like to see Google Docs add the functionality of defining share groups, so when users DO need to define different levels of access that can be accomplished even more readily.
Yeah for Google Docs!
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Comments
One response to “Google Docs Adds Folder Sharing”
Thanks!! I can’t wait to use this feature. It will be so nice to set up folders for classes and then be able to just drag items into them that we want to share as a class. Way to go Google!