Insights - Shared drives

3 minute read

This section gives you an overview of all the shared drives you have in your organization, including drives with no shared files on them.

Note that information about shared drives in this section is drawn from your tenant every 4 hours, so drives created after the last data fetch will not be visible.

Using column sorting, you can quickly get an overview of the shared drives with the most sharing activity. And in the column Exception, you can also see the shared drives, where exceptions to the global cleanup settings for shared drives have been introduced.

Clicking a shared drive will display a list of all the files on it eligible for cleanup that its members have shared with both colleagues in your own organization and people outside it.

If you need to download a .csv file listing the shared files, just use the Download button.

Access to files inherited through membership of shared drive

Some external users may have access to a file because they are members of the shared drive the file is on. These users' permissions will not be shown on the file, and if the file is shared solely through membership, we will not show the file in the list at all. This is because we are unable to do anything about the sharing at file level.

If you want to revoke the users' access to the file, you need to go to Google Workspace and do something about their membership of the shared drive.

Unsharing permissions

This list is, of course, identical to the one you can pull up in the Files area when selecting a shared drive that you are responsible for. And just like in Files, you can easily unshare or extend the sharing of individual files using the relevant buttons or icons.

Note that clicking a file's name will open a side panel that gives you an overview of all the users that the file is shared with and their permission levels. This enables you to remove permission on selected accounts instead of unsharing the file entirely.

You can access the individual file directly by clicking the three dots and then Open in Google Drive.

Access inherited through shared folders

Some users may have access to the file inherited from the shared folder its in. This means that Tricent is unable to unshare the permissions to the file with these users at this level.

You can click the folder name in the sidepanel to be taken to the shared folder and unshare the user's access to the folder - and with it access to the file in the folder.

You can also get a full overview of the files and subfolders the shared folder contains by finding it in the list, clicking the three dots and selecting Go to folder.

External members of a drive

If a shared drive has members that are external, the drive will be marked with a red exclamation point icon. If you click the icon, you can see who the externals are and their role on it.

If you want to remove a specific external user's membership of the drive, you need to access your Google Workspace admin area.

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