Shared Drives - unable to edit on Business Starter

[petrvecera]

Hello guys

In May 2023, it was announced that Shared Drives are coming to Business Starter edition https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2023/05/pooled-storage-shared-drives-for-google-workspace-bu...

We have different licenses in our org, some are on higher tier and some are on Business starter. 

When we create a shared drive, we CAN'T invite people on Business starter to edit folders / or the whole drive. We can invite them only to single file. Or to have view access to the whole drive. 

I don't understand where is the problem? When they announced it, does it mean that Business Starer can only view the files but can't edit them? 

If anyone have any tips, they would be welcomed. 

Thank you 

[KevinApodaca]

Hey @petrvecera 

Shared Drives being enabled for Business Starer does not mean all the admin controls and functionality will come along. 

Business Starter will have what we consider "fundamental" shared drives. In short: 

- Business Starter customers will not have certain admin settings to supervise SD creation.
- Business Starter customers will not get any of the security settings to “safeguard” SD content.

[petrvecera]

Hi Kevin

Thank you for your response. 

But does it mean that people on business starter can't be shared full folder inside Shared Drive? For edit? Because I believe people should be able to edit the files there. Otherwise it makes no sense to have shared drives at all. We can work as we did till now, there is project folder in normal drive and team is shared access to the project folder. 

Thank you 

[KevinApodaca]

So to clarify, the behavior you are seeing is the old behavior, how it used to work on Business Starter (and in your case also a mixed license environment).

While we did announce that Shared Drives could come to the Business Starter SKU, we have hit some rollout blocking challenges that have delayed this process. And for context, having Shared Drives would not actually do much in this case if the Business Starter account hasn't been enrolled into pooled storage. 

All to say, it is very complicated process that we are working to resolve as soon as possible. We understand the rollout has been slow and that customers have been waiting for a long time but we are in the best place right now to finalize the execution of this. 

The best solution in the interim for a customer that really really needs Shared Drive functionality, is to upgrade to another SKU (such as Business Standard) for the time being and downgrade in the future.

[petrvecera]

I see, so the thing which I am seeing right now is the wrong behaviour. And it should resolve in the upcoming weeks / months. Btw we do have pooled storage already. 

I understand the complicated nature of the things. It's just when it was announced almost 1 year ago, we very really happy - and we planned a big reorg how we work with files, it was in our KPI for 2023 but we couldn't do it.

I hope this features will work as expected soon.  Thank you 👍