Google has always been my got to product for anything I need. So naturally, when I started working with the GSuite I was not worried they always looked after my needs. If not sometimes better than Microsoft. So why is Team Drives such a disappointment to me?

The Back Story

Let me create a bit of Context so that you understand where I am coming from.

When I started in IT, FAT Permissions was already phased out and NTFS Permissions was being used by most organizations. For the smaller companies that were set in their ways, they did not move away from FAT permissions until the machines had absolutely no choice of being replaced. This gave me the best of both worlds as I was able to work with both environments.

As I learned more, I quickly found out how domain controllers made life easier. And groups made managing shared folders a breeze if planned correctly. We still had the occasional folder that needed explicit permissions for a User but mainly adding users to a group would be sufficient.

Personal Google Drive

Then came the cloud working more productively from anywhere. Again we did not move this direction until much later. This is where I in my personal capacity discovered Google Drive and started using this for my backup solution. I quickly got the Family involved and I backed up their data as well. Now I needed to make sure each person had access to their Photos and Data without the other people accessing it. Guess what…. it worked just like expected. I could share specific folders with specific people and give them the required permissions. What is even better it was instant. Everything I expect and was used to form a Local Share worked on Google Drive.

Share Point Online

Our Company caught up and we decide to move to Share Point Online as a Shared folder environment. I put in a few days of Research and set up the environment and great it works exactly the same. Microsoft did it I was able to replicate the environment. Now everything is available on the web with web apps that I don’t even need clients installed we can literally just work from anywhere.

Team Drive

With a few Security issues still being investigated, I found out about GSuite. Since I am already hooked on it in my personal capacity I get the vendors in to come and Demo and really it looks like everything I expected. So here I am creating a Trail to see for myself how this is done. The setup went so smooth I had everything up and running within half an hour.

Then came Team Drive. In Short, they took Google Personal drive and stripped away all the feature you would expect.

You can now only set permission on the  Team folder:

Subfolder cannot have separate permission:

Strangely enough, you can set permission on a file level as long as it is not lower than what the permission is on the Team Drive.

I honestly hope that Team Drive will update soon to include the required permission one expects from a corporate environment. For smaller companies, I can see the transition would be easy but for the larger companies out there this can be a major let down.