Google announces Team Drives & Drive File Stream for enterprise + AppBridge acquisition

Team Drives is a collaborative feature to address multiple users creating and editing files in the cloud, which is something we’ve seen other cloud providers do recently.

Soon to become Google’s latest billion-user product is the storage service Google Drive, which now has more than 800 million monthly active users. Team Drives, for example, is a new cloud-based file storage solution that aims to make collaboration easier between team members.

Google made Team Drive available to its G Suite Business, Education, and Enterprise customers on March 9.

Team Drives allows enterprises to keep their data safe by providing more controls on the shared data.

Next up is Google Vault, which unfortunately sounds cooler than it really is. It has also acquired AppBridge, a company that helps companies migrate to Google Cloud from Sharepoint, or whatever else they might be using.

Raghavan said he thinks the most significant news is the unveiling of the Drive File Stream, which offers convenience to users with Windows or Mac laptop. The typical use of Vault spans from audit reports to legal holds to setting retention rules for archiving data.

None of these things are precisely revolutionary features – and in the case of Drive File Stream in particular, it feels like table stakes.

Finally, as originally released on Android, Quick Access will automatically suggest files you may wanna jump to from within the Drive interface. Google chose to start with some of the most significant points, managing file storage and ownership on users’ PCs. All files are streamed “on demand”, but they can be stored locally too for offline access when needed.

“You’re probably familiar with Google Drive as essentially a personal file storage solution”, Google VP of Engineering Prabhakar Raghavan told TechCrunch ahead of the big reveal of the new Drive tools today.

– Quick Access: Google’s artificial intelligence system already knows which files are most used by each member within the company, and for that already has a lot of information available in cache so that the loading of content is immediate and personalized for each one.

Google’s recent strategic acquisitions ensure that all bases are covered and that teams will be able to use Google Drive as smoothly as individuals use the service. This feature utilizes machine learning to detect patterns in the usage of Drive subscribers. This is part of a shared cloud folder which can be used by employees to put their notes and files into it.

AppBridge moves files from existing servers and content management systems to systems to a company’s cloud platform of choice, according to Google.