Google Drive

Google Drive is an awesome free cloud based online file storage software provided by Google as part of your account. You can use it anywhere you have an internet connection on a smartphone, computer or tablet. It's a very strong idea to backup your files in multiple places as a preventative measure. And Google Drive makes this possible. The 15GB included free with your account which is up from 5GB is a ton of room for text and images. Video can get pretty in terms of file size but there's plenty of room for several large videos too. I love that the Gmail I use everyday links directly to Google Drive so I can email photos taken with my phone to myself for convenience and also place them into Google Drive because you can never backup enough. It's also super easy to share files from your Google Drive and you can send invites to file to specific emails or by copy and pasting a shareable URL link to it. And you can grant permissions to the file so people can either edit the file, comment on it or simply view it. It couldn't be much easier to do and it's worked every time. The difference between using Google Drive and email is the ability in Google Drive to see changes from people in real time. So it's a legitimate sharing tool not just useful for backups. I am currently using this tool to share real time project updates with co-workers. It works very well because I require both a spreadsheet and a text file; with Google Docs built right into the project Gmail I have both and they are stored in the Google Drive automatically. My communication in the project is always available for the development team to note my updates in real time as I've utilized the sharing functionality to grant them access. This much usefulness in a set of free tools is seriously awesome. Google has come a long way from the first days of search. You used to have to be invited to use Gmail and they didn't offer much else yet. Nowadays, to have so much value available with tools like Google Drive, Gmail, Google Docs and Hang Outs while having become simpler overall to use as well; it's something we probably take for granted as a whole. But this company plays a big role in the day to day life of hundreds of millions of people saving us time, energy and money. When the internet was new there was nothing like it online. Google giving us global search for free with using the most simple possible web page to do so was THE game changer, in my opinion. It felt like the first thing to ever go viral and they haven't dwindled away like MySpace or countless others. Yet they earn a profit based on this freemium business model through their advertising platform and other upgraded products and services. If you would have asked me prior to the internet if I would have believed there would be a company I would use every single day multiple times to communicate with people around the world daily on business projects in real time FOR FREE I would have said yeah right.

There's not a whole lot to dislike about this service. The storage upgrades are inexpensive currently at $1.99 for increments of 100GB added to your account. But I believe that would actually equal slightly more than I am paying Amazon S3 when you add it up to equal the couple terabytes of files I backup. Therefore I currently only use Google Drive for project specific backups and real time project updates. There's going to be a learning curve if you've never used Google before. Because it's more than one tool which takes a little getting used to, but not much, getting to utilize Google Drive, Google Docs, Gmail, Hangouts and others into a streamlined, efficient workflow will take a few hours or a few days depending on your previous experience.

Overall, if you are creative you can use a Google account for a great project manager. Since they added Google Docs, Google Drive, Google Hangouts into one main Google account it's become this amazingly organized way to share project updates in real time in a number of ways for free. Or just use their stuff for personal reasons it's great for both; how you can you go wrong? My highest recommendation.