- Being able to easily store
and retrieve information is crucial in business.
New tools allows us not only better ways to manage files,
they let us share more easily with others both inside
and outside our organizations.
At the most basic, there are network shared drives.
For a long time, this was pretty much all we had.
Shared drives allow you to store
and retrieve information alright,
but they're limited and not very flexible.
Access is restricted and usually controlled
by a central administrator,
so giving access to additional people gets complicated.
Additionally, they don't usually give much information about
who has access, who has edited or added or deleted files,
and other details you may need.
A step above this are dedicated document management systems.
Some products that are available at this
time are Samepage, LogicalDOC, and FileHold,
however, they're pretty specialized.
What's more popular these days are online tools
such as OneDrive, Google Drive, and Box.
Now, many people use these as personal solutions,
but they're widely used at an enterprise level, too.
I'm going to include SharePoint in this list.
Although it's not just a file management system,
that's one of its more popular uses.
There are a lot of other tools
that allow for file sharing, too.
For instance, you can share files in Slack or Cisco Spark,
but that's not really their primary function,
so I'm gonna pass over them for the moment.
The thing that all these tools have in common is
that they have much better ways
of tracking information about what happens with a file.
When it's loaded, when it's edited,
who edited it, when it's deleted, et cetera.
You can usually not only see file history,
but retrieve older versions of the file if necessary.
Now, another feature that differentiates these tools
from your standard network folders is
that you can typically share information
with people outside your company.
They'll be security rules set up around this, of course
and some companies choose not
to enable the external sharing,
but for those that do, you can usually control
what kind of access the recipients have
and even set links to expire after a set time.
Let's take a quick look at Google Drive.
Here's a fairly typical folder that I set up as an example.
I've shared documents with a bunch of people
and you can see who they are
because they're displayed along the top
of the right-hand information column in the Details tab.
Now, for some of the files, there's Activity.
You can see that people have made comments or edits
by looking in this column on the right.
Scrolling through enables you to see the entire history
of the document.
If you wanted to open an older version to compare it,
just click the link.
One quick note, when you need to share the document
with somebody new, do not attach it to an email and send it,
send them the link from the sharing application.
We'll talk more about this later.
Sharing a file is pretty easy.
Right-click on it and select Share from the pop-up menu.
You'll get a dialog where you can grant permissions
by groups or individuals.
This is also where you'd remove permissions if needed.
One thing about Google Drive is that it's not
so simple to capture additional metadata about the files,
which enables organizations to better organize
and retrieve information.
SharePoint is a lot more robust in this.
You can add custom fields and create multiple views
of the same data for different audience purposes.
As the technology progresses,
most of the better file management systems have added
the ability to co-edit files.
We'll talk about that more in an upcoming video.
If you want more information about some
of the individual tools I've talked about,
our library has courses where you can learn details.
I've also got a course around SharePoint data management
that goes into a little bit more detail about metadata
and custom views.