In a virtual workspace environment, the ability to seamlessly share files with team members or fellow employees is of utmost importance. For organizations that are dependent onGoogle Workspacefor collaborative tools and communication,Drive is the obvious choicefor a file storage service. Google is now making it effortless to share Drive files with attendees of future meetings that are listed on Google Calendar.
The process is fairly straightforward as one would expect. An owner or editor of a particular file can access theSharedialog either by right-clicking on the file or through the three-dot button on the top right of the file. This opens a search field to type the names of people you want to share the file with. But in addition to individuals in the organization, this field can now display future Calendar meetings as well, automatically sharing the file with all the attendees.
File owners or editors will have the same degree of control over the type of access the attendees will have (Editor, Viewer, or Commenter). There’s also the option to limit file access to select attendees of the meeting. To make things more streamlined, people can choose to attach the Drive file to the Calendar entry using a simple checkbox, as shown below. The checkbox to notify the invited attendees and a message field have been retained from the older share dialog.
Google saysattaching a file within a Calendar invite will activate a pop-up asking if the file owner/editor wants to share it with the attendees. This new feature will be available to all Workspace customers, including those with personal Google accounts, per the company. However, users may have to wait a couple of weeks to find this feature on Drive.
The screenshots shared by Google suggest this feature will make it to the web version of Drive first. While there’s no mention of its availability on mobile apps, we expect that to change in due course. This isn’t a groundbreaking addition by any means, but it can save you the trouble of manually selecting each user you want to share the file with. Google provides the example of giving attendees some context on what they would be collaborating on ahead of the meeting.
Google constantly updates its apps to keep things consistent across platforms and also to introduce new functionality. Among the recent changes made to Google Drive on the web was a new interface,adhering to Material Design 3 guidelines. The Android version of Drive also picked up some MD3 elements not too long ago while alsopicking up a visual overhaulto its built-in document scanning functionality.
