We would like to use Google Drive to share data with our branch office in the USA. The employees there have an Office365 account, so they should only have external access to a shared repository, which they can access using the pin procedure. But: They should also be able to upload files, an exchange. For this they would have to be content managers. Only I can’t set that up.
Question: How can I set it up and give the external user content manager rights on the shared drive?
I added a new user (&&&@&&&.com), wrote a message and entered him as content manager. That worked perfectly. Then I got carried away and deleted the others (email addresses from the US) where it didn’t work and wanted to add them in the same way. Now I can’t add them as content managers or contributors. (I’m doing something very wrong… just don’t know what.) Can you guys help with this?
The first new user for whom it worked, confused you there. The difference is that behind his email address is a Google account. You can see this by navigating to myaccount.google.com in an incognito window and entering this email address. You will be asked for a password. If you do the same with one of the other addresses, you will get an error message that the account could not be found.
Basically, in Google Drive, the permission to move and delete files can only be given to people with Google accounts, because it has to be reliably logged who did it and when. Therefore, you can only authorize a non-Google account with “Contributor”.
In the case of shared drives, the situation is further complicated by the fact that only Google accounts can be entered at the top level of the shared drive. Visitor Sharing (i.e. sharing Google Drive content with non-Google accounts) is currently not possible at the “Member of a Shared Drive” level (for similar reasons as above).
More info about Google Sheets and Google Workspace can be found here on our pages.