Category: Google Drive

Google Drive and Google Apps for Education are powerful collaborative tools. They don’t have the most intuitive interface, however, and finding things that have been shared with you can be challenging. This week’s edition of “A Minute to Learn It” focuses on how to organize your Google Drive to be more useful. Read the full tip here.

Today, the final group of people moving from Zimbra to Gmail got their “all clear” message stating that all the email for all the people in this migration cohort had been copied to Gmail. This means that individual accounts for all Carleton people are now officially complete. Meanwhile, the project team continues to work hard to move all the shared inboxes in use on campus from Zimbra to Google.

As you settle into using Gmail and Google Calendar, if there are things you can’t figure out how to do, we invite you to contact the helpdesk (x5999 or webhelpdesk@carleton.edu) or try the “help” tool available under the gear-shaped button in Gmail and Google Calendar.

Turning attention to Dropbox, we are excited that Dropbox will soon implement features that will be quite beneficial to the Carleton Community, and we have signed on to be a beta testing campus for these new features. As we learn more about these features and about the beta testing process we will use this information as we work with departments to determine a good date for each of their moves to using cloud storage (Dropbox and Google Drive) for departmental files and folders.

The largest batch of people to move from Zimbra to Gmail have now completed their transitions. Only one more batch of people is still waiting to move to Gmail, and they will all move beginning the evening of July 7th. By this time next week, the whole campus will be using Gmail and Google Calendar!

As we near the end of the email and calendar move, various departments are working with ITS to determine their best options for shared email resources (like shared inboxes or shared email addresses). ITS is reaching out to people we know of who use these shared resources but if you haven’t heard from us about a shared resource you use, please contact the ITS helpdesk (webhelpdesk@carleton.edu or x5999).

As the email and calendar transitions wind to a close, the transition from Collab to the Cloud is ramping up. Our three early adopter departments (ITS, Library & Archives, and Off Campus Studies) have all completed their transitions and report that the process went well. We have learned a lot from the experience of these early adopters and are now distilling what we’ve learned into a process for the rest of campus. Plan to hear from us 6-8 weeks before your department is scheduled to transition away from Collab! And if you’re curious or want to get a jump start, there is is an ever-increasing amount of information about Dropbox and Google Drive and ever-increasing training information available on our website.

Zimbra was quite generous with the file sizes it allowed people to attach to emails. No other major email system is as generous, and Gmail is no exception. This means that if you have a file larger than 25MB, you’ll have to use a method other than email attachments to send it to other people. While there are lots of ways to do this, the two most common and best supported on campus will be to send links from either Dropbox or Google Drive. Here’s how to manage this….

Last week, the majority of faculty and a few staff got their Gmail accounts and began having their email and calendar appointments copied over from Zimbra to Gmail and Google Calendar. The process went well, by and large, with two minor snags. First, there was a configuration error that resulted in incoming email bouncing back to the sender for 50 minutes on Thursday evening. ITS was able to contact the small number of people who would have received these bounced messages and tell those intended recipients who had emailed them and what the subject line of the message was. Second, the initial stage of email copying had to be run twice, resulting in the initial copy finishing up around 11am on Friday morning rather than at 8am as planned.

Email sent to lists (like those ending in @lists.carleton.edu) was also delayed initially, but is now running smoothly.

If you have not yet attended a training session online or in person, check out the training options. And if you are having trouble getting Gmail to work for your needs, consider stopping by a drop-in session or contacting the ITS Helpdesk.

In COLLAB news, Off Campus Studies will begin moving their COLLAB files to Dropbox and/or Google Drive tomorrow! They have been thinking through their new file organization and seem ready to make the leap.

After OCS moves from COLLAB to the Cloud, the next big transition will be moving all the returning students from Zimbra to Gmail and Google Calendar starting the evening of June 23rd.

Why get just one tip when you can have a whole library? Google’s Tips Library is full of ideas for all of the Google Apps (Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, etc). It’s definitely worth exploring.

ITS started moving its own departmental folders to a combination of Dropbox and Google Drive late last week, and tomorrow the Library and Archives will begin the same process. As early adopters, these departments will test the transition process and begin the campus-wide conversation about best practices, tips, and tricks.

Since we expect that the various departments on campus will use the various file storage options quite differently to suit their needs, the process of moving from COLLAB to Dropbox and/or Google Drive will involve much more departmentally tailored information sharing than the Zimbra-to-Gmail process had. Much of the information you get will come to you from your department’s File Management Steward, who will work closely with ITS to develop a plan for your department’s transition.

Meanwhile, pre-migration training for the transition to Gmail and Google Calendar is well underway. Here is a list of scheduled training sessions. Faculty and Departmental Assistants will get their Gmail accounts on June 9th, so if you’re in that group come to one of our upcoming training sessions to learn about Gmail and Google Calendar. Even those early adopters who have used Gmail and Google Calendar for years have reported that these training sessions are useful, so come over to CMC110 and join your colleagues in preparing for the move to Gmail!

And finally, we’re gathering a whole year’s worth of “Tips of the Week” for Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, and Dropbox. Did you know you can set up your calendar so that students can sign up for pre-defined appointment slots? Or that you can filter emails from your aunt to a special space that only appears if there’s a new message to read? Watch this space!

One of the great things about Google Drive is being able to share and work on documents, spreadsheets, and more while someone else works on it at the same time. But when someone shares a file with you, where can you find it again? Here’s what to do.

If you have the file open in your browser, click “File” and then “Organize.” From there, you can select an existing folder in your Google Drive or create a new folder.

If you are looking at the files or folders in the “Shared with Me” section of Google Drive, you can select  one or more of them and then click “Add to my Drive.”

From there you can drag the file or folder into one of your folders, leave it in your main Google Drive folder, or click the 3-dot menu icon and select “move to” to move the file or folder to a logical spot in your organizational scheme.

Either way, you’ll now have the shared file or folder in your own file structure in Google Drive, organized however you prefer.

Bonus Tips:

1. If you rename a file or folder, everyone it’s shared with will see the new name.
2. If multiple people share a folder that has subfolders, and if you move a file from one sub-folder to another in this shared folder, the file location will be changed for everyone else as well.
3. BUT, if you have a shared file or folder, you can put that file or folder into one of your own folders without anyone else knowing. So, for example, if someone shares a project folder with me, I can pull the folder into my own folder called “Projects” or something without affecting anything that the other person can see.
   On the right you can see that I have 2 shared folders and one personal folder all grouped under a personal folder called “ITS.” Nobody in the two shared folders needs to know that I’ve grouped the shared folders under my personal parent folder, but the little person icon helps me understand that everything I change inside of those shared folders will change things for the other participants.