Powered by the pistons of QuickOffice and unlimited storage and intricate controls for administrators, a new, high-octane version of Google Drive for business users was unveiled at the company's annual developer's conference in San Francisco.
The revamped version of Google Drive comes at a premium of $10 a month per user and was available as soon as it was announced at Google I/O 2014 on June 25.
Scott Johnston, director of product management for Google Drive, posted a press release on Google's Official Enterprise Blog about why his company felt it needed to upgrade Google Drive. Johnson stated more than 190 million people use Google Drive, but businesses have requested more control and security from the cloud storage service.
"Google Drive for Work combines the familiar storage, sync and share experience of Google Drive with new admin controls, advanced file audit reporting and eDiscovery services," stated the release. "New fine-grained controls let admins customize the Drive experience, such as which employees can install the desktop sync client."
The audit feature Johnston referred to enables organizations to actively track a file's movements. The "Audit View" presents administrator with a history of a files activity, including events such as sharing a document with outsiders or deleting it.
Google Apps Vault will serve as an archive for Google Drive and other apps released by Google. Google Apps Vault enables administrators to set retention rules for messages, place legal holds on users and their documents, search their organization's electronic documents, export data and audit their archives.
The release by Johnston on the Official Enterprise Blog also assured businesses that Google will encrypt data stored on its servers, as well as information being transmitted to or from them. And if businesses were intrigued by Microsoft's offerings of 15 GB of free storage for its OneDrive service and 1 TB for Office 365 users, Google looked to steal the spotlight when it announced Google Drive's premium users will have unlimited storage space -- in addition, premium users of Google Drive can upload files as large as 5 TB.
Challenging Microsoft's Office 365 on another front, Google revealed that Google Drive premium will have Quickoffice embedded in it.
"We've now built the power of Quickoffice into Docs, Sheets and Slides, so you can open and edit those documents in their native format using Office Compatibility Mode directly on Android and Chrome browser today, and coming soon to iOS. No need to buy additional software or decide how to open your file," stated the release.
Google will deliver around-the-clock support to Google Drive's premium users and, like any other reputable cloud service, it has guaranteed a 99.9 percent uptime for its servers.
