Collaboration, powerful search and amazing versioning capabilities, at a fair price.
June 09, 2016
Collaboration, powerful search and amazing versioning capabilities, at a fair price.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Google Drive
Google Drive is used across the organization to create, collaborate on, and share documents, spreadsheets, and sometimes presentations. It has provided central storage of documents for our 100% remote and distributed team. Google Drive empowers content and document collaboration through in-line comments and by allowing collaborators to edit and see changes to documents while working remotely. It's also provided a way share budget and cost tracking spreadsheets within the management team without needing direct access to accounting software. No more version management nightmares!
- In-line comment threads make comments clearer and easier to understand
- Real-time editing in the cloud is super powerful for document collaboration. One person can make changes and the other can see those changes, and even contribute their own changes in real-time.
- Easy ability to quickly open Microsoft Word and Excel documents means even software engineers will read them!
- Reduced licensing costs compared to providing Microsoft Office for the entire company.
- Powerful search makes it extremely easy to find documents.
- Powerful versioning makes it extremely easy to see who made what changes when, and to revert to an older version.
- Auto-save means no more lost documents due to software crashes.
- Organizing and sharing documents across teams and the organization can get messy. Luckily the powerful search means organizing documents isn't as important.
- Some users get confused using the Drive application, but the webapp is always an easy alternative.
- iOS and Android apps are somewhat limited, but getting much better over time.
- It's hard to put a value on improved collaboration, but it's been huge.
- Per user license costs savings and infrastructure savings are huge.
- It's one of the major tools that's allowed our company to become 100% distributed and remote, and the savings from no longer having a large office, and being able to hire talent across the US is hard to measure.
- Box
Google Drive is far superior to Box in terms of team collaboration, sharing, search, and versioning. However, Box has been our preferred choice for organizing documents into traditional folder structures. In my opinion, Drive is a better choice, because Box sometimes loses changes to documents, and the version management is not nearly as strong in Box, leading to users creating files with versions or initials in the filename, causing even more version management problems. And there really is no real-time collaboration capability in Box. It's just a secure, cloud-based file share.