Item: Google Drive
Rating: 9
Author: Jose F. Gomez

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Google Drive to store, maintain and share documentation about our department's processes and projects. It's essential to our business model because it narrows the communication and expectation setting gap with our teams and our customers.

With it, we can share project documentation and keep traceability of updates and with its powerful scripting engine, we can make some amazing spreadsheets that pull data from various sources to keep people up to date with company/project metrics.

Pros and Cons

Sharing documents/spreadsheets/presentations with other people.
Macros in spreadsheets/scripting.

Performance of complex spreadsheets could be better, it's still slower than MS Excel in some cases
No/limited VB macro compatibility

Return on Investment

We're able to quickly create new documents based on past templates that are centralized and kept up to date with best practices.
It helps us do better peer reviews by leveraging comments and "suggest" mode.

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Office 365

Google Drive works better in my opinion and is more reliable. Once you get a hang of it, its simplicity is hard to match and it's what makes it so easy and fun to use yet its scripting capabilities, using Javascript, make it as powerful as you can make it be.

Support Rating

Their documentation is good and simple, but I found it rather short for some functions. That said, it's compensated by the vast technical documentation of Google Apps Scripts, that make it clear and easy to learn their scripting capabilities.

I've never had to contact technical support.

Key Insights

Do you think Google Drive delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Google Drive's feature set?

Yes

Did Google Drive live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Google Drive go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Google Drive again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

It's great for building presentations, documents or spreadsheets collaboratively.
Scripting enables more functionality than expected, including accessing data from sources external to Google Drive and scheduling recurrent jobs.
Sharing documents and information across different teams is easy, keeping all in sync it's even easier.
It can use in scenarios where a peer review is needed as well, making it an excellent tool for audits/revisions.

Today's businesses run on Google Drive

Overall Satisfaction with Google Drive