It’s a small feature, but it’s a big time save. Users of G Suite will soon be able to add shortcuts to specific files or folders for your convenience. The feature will need to be enabled by domain admins, but once it is you’ve got the freedom to further customise your Drive interface and use.
As outlined in the blog post, Google has a vision on how this will be used:
Paul in marketing shares a document from his team’s shared drive with the entire sales team, Greta in sales can create a shortcut to that document in her own team’s shared drive.
For shared documents in team, once this is enabled the “add to my drive” will disappear. Replaced by “add shortcut to drive” resulting in access to the shared copy rather than a copy of the original which can lead to document version control issues.
Looking at the feature further, I really like the fact that you can choose where in your Drive structure you place the shortcut. This is because I have a carefully set out folder and document structure. I know where my documents are, I know where my folders are but if someone shares a document with me – that’s when I sometimes need to step sideways to find the document. This clearly fits in with the vision Google have.
The Google Drive and G Suite teams are constantly making the platform more useful and powerful for users. Is there any daily data use function that are missing from Drive to make it your go-to for documents, spreadsheets and presentations?
