Adoption of Just Drive

Use Case

Just Drive is a great tool for sharing and managing files. It consists of drives, folders and files like any file system. Therefore, its general use requires little to no explanation.

Structure of Just Drive

Just Drive is built for making file sharing fast, easy and fun. To create a drive, just type in the name and give users permissions to read, write and administrate – and off you go. The permissions apply to every folder and file uploaded to the entire drive.

Most other file sharing tools allow for the possibility of giving permissions on the level of files and folders too. This frequently results in deep and cascading folder structures with complex permission rights. These structures have several disadvantages:

• Complex administration 
  Deep structures with different permissions on every level are highly complex to administrate. Thus, they usually require central administration. Some users and whole departments may try to avoid this: Instead of contacting the IT department for support, they will start using other (unofficial) tools that they can manage and control themselves.

• Tedious navigation 
  Cascading folder structures are tedious to navigate – nobody wants to click half a dozen times just to get to a file, and few people will remember the click path. That is why deep folder structures often make it harder to find files than flat structures: Although deep structures provide the benefit of showing less options at a time, the lack of providing an overview at a glance and instead requiring the users to remember various click paths outweigh the benefits.

• Low transparency 
  If every folder and every file can have different permissions, users will not have a clear understanding of the folders & files they are able to access. Similarly, they will not be very confident on where and how to create new folders and files since they are unsure about the access rights.

For these reasons, Just Drive only lets you grant permissions on drives – and thus is very easy to understand for both admins and users. This simplicity results in maximum transparency and control over the application which is the basis for users’ trust, acceptance and engagement.

Public company drive

Many of our clients have created a public drive accessible for all employees in the entire organization. It contains central documents such as company presentations, logos, forms etc.

In many organizations, this drive will be administrated by a few people who make sure that the drive is structured in the most efficient way without redundancies and outdated filed. All other users only have the permission to “read” the files.

Since such central documents have traditionally been stored in the intranet of many organizations, some of our customers call it the “public intranet drive”. Alternatively, this use case can also be covered by creating a company wiki. Please see “adoption of Just Wiki” for more information on when to use Just Wiki versus Just Drive.

Private team drives

We recommend creating private drives for supporting the collaboration within smaller teams such as departments and/or projects. These drives should be accessible only for team members for three reasons:

• Preventing information overload
  Collaborative team drives tend to contain files which are not relevant to users outside of the team. Preventing access to irrelevant information reduces information overload e.g. when browsing or searching.

• Compliance 
  Collaborative team drives often include sensitive information about e.g. clients, contracts, R&D, personnel etc. Data protection acts require organizations to reduce access to certain types of sensitive information only to those employees who need to know the information (“need-to-know basis”).

• Misappropriation of information
  Reducing access to the knowledge of an organization minimizes the potential for its (intentional and unintentional) misappropriation through employees – and thus protects the value of the company.

Whenever a team has created a file that is relevant to a wider audience (e.g. a new guideline or presentation), it needs to be shared with that audience to prevent the team drives from becoming information silos. This can be done either by uploading the document to the public company drive or to the company wiki, for example. In addition, writing a post in Just News with a short explanation plus a link to the file may also be helpful.

Organizational specifics

In every organization, there may be lots of other use cases that require creating more public and/or private drives. The use cases and appropriate structures will depend on the characteristics and needs of the organization.

In large diversified and/or internationalized companies, for example, creating one centrally administrated public drive for the entire organization may not be feasible. Instead, there may be several administrated drives which are private to certain regions or business units.

Migrating to Just Drive

Almost all companies already have file sharing tools in place, ranging from stationary file servers to web-based apps like Dropbox to complex document management systems. However, a migration from any of these systems to Just Drive is often neither possible nor recommendable for several reasons:

• Permissions
  Permissions on files and folders cannot be migrated since they are not supported by Just Drive.

• Clean up 
  You should take the chance of getting rid of outdated and redundant files as well as optimizing the structure of your drives and folders.

• Efficiency 
  A migration of (all) files to Just Drive is usually not worth the effort.

As a matter of fact, many of our clients have started using Just Drive in addition to their existing file sharing tools without any migration of files. They discovered that after a short period of parallel use, the old systems were hardly used at all. The reason for this smooth transition lies in the fact that most of the work is usually done on very recent files as knowledge quickly becomes outdated these days.

For example, when e.g. a project is finished the corresponding files are often no longer needed in daily business and only kept for documentation. In the few cases in which the documentation is actually needed, the old file sharing systems should remain accessible for some time.

Migration only makes sense in cases of files which are either very important (e.g. contracts) or needed frequently. This critical knowledge is often (and should be) stored separately from other files in e.g. intranets, wikis or documents management systems. Thus, the corresponding files and information need to be migrated to e.g. the company drive or to company wiki (see adoption of Just Wiki for more information).

If such a migration takes considerable time/effort (e.g. due to the quantity and complexity of your data), you can also leave the critical knowledge in the “old” system and use Just Drive for collaborative file sharing only. Many clients who wanted to start using Just Drive quickly have done this successfully and then took on the migration at a later point in time.

Usage

File sharing is a use case that is on average needed a few times a day depending on the nature of both the job and the organization. Nevertheless, the use case is strong enough to draw users in: Without having access to files, most employees are unable to get their work done. For this reason, it is possible to use Just Drive without any other Just Social apps and still achieve successful adoption.

If you want to implement Just Social to support team collaboration, it is advisable to implement Just Drive in addition to Just Connect to allow teams to store their files in a more structured way.