Cloud File Sharing Best Practices

Cloud File Sharing Best Practices


OneDrive and Google Drive put you in charge of how widely you want your information to be shared. With each, you have different permission levels available to you to guide how you’d like others to collaborate on a project with you.

OneDrive file sharing is pretty straight forward.

  1. First, if your company policy requires you to set a password - be sure to share that password only after making sure person you're sharing the password with is the intended recipient. You can do this via phone confirmation or share the password through an encrypted email. Never send a password in plain text to anyone.
  2. Second, OneDrive alerts you by email once your share link is used and gives you a link to edit the sharing permissions. From there, you may revoke access by user or disable sharing earlier than the expiration date you set when you shared the file. You can see all your share files on One Drive by going to Office Online and clicking OneDrive, clicking Sharing in the navigation bar, and Shared by Me at the top of the page.
  3. Third, keep an eye out for notifications that the file you're sharing contains sensitive information. This is the result of policies designed to protect the information important to your organization.






With Google Workspace, here are some good rules of thumb to consider before you share anything.

  • First, when should you give “edit” access? For the most part, you grant edit access to people that are core creators of your document. It says “I trust this colleague to make helpful changes.” This typically happens toward the beginning of a project when you need to add ideas into a document.
  • Second, when should you give “comment” access? It’s a good idea to grant comment access to others when you need input from multiple contributors or when you need to tap another team’s expertise. Your teammates can suggest text edits directly within a document.
  • Third, when should you give “view-only” access? Granting view-only access works great when you want to socialize an idea or distribute a document without requesting feedback on it. View-only access communicates, “you should be aware that this thing is happening, but please do not provide direct input.”

Whatever permissions you initially set with G-Suite can be changed at any time. Change sharing permissions G Suite