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As an administrator, you can let all or some users in your organization create shared drives. For example, if you're a business you might want to let everyone create shared drives to support team collaboration and prevent data loss when an employee leaves. However, if you're an educational institution, you might only allow instructors to create shared drives, not students.
Note: If shared drive creation is turned off for users in an organizational unit, people inside and outside of your company or school can still add these users to their shared drives.
Before you begin: To apply the setting for certain users, put their accounts in an organizational unit.
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Sign in to your Google Admin console.
Sign in using your administrator account (does not end in @gmail.com).
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In the Admin console, go to Menu
Apps
Google Workspace
- Click Sharing settings
- To apply the setting to everyone, leave the top organizational unit selected. Otherwise, select a child organizational unit.
- Locate the Prevent users in selected-organizational-unit from creating new shared drives box and choose an option:
- To allow users to create shared drives, uncheck the box.
- To prevent users from creating shared drives, check the box.
- (Optional) If you allow users to create shared drives, choose which organizational unit the shared drives are created in by default. You can move shared drives to other organizational units later. This option can help you monitor and manage storage for your organization.
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(Optional) Set the default sharing settings for new shared drives, and choose whether shared drive managers can override those settings.
- To prevent external users from accessing files in shared drives, uncheck the second box. External users won't have access, even if you allow users to share files outside of your organization. This setting also blocks shared drive managers from adding external users as members. If users aren’t allowed to share any items in Drive outside of your organization, this setting has no effect because it can’t override the sharing setting.
- To prevent shared drive members from giving non-members view, comment, or edit access to files in shared drives, or sharing these files with a link, uncheck the third box. You might do this for organizational units that handle sensitive data that shouldn’t be shared outside that organizational unit.
- To prevent Content managers from sharing folders, uncheck Allow content managers to share folders. You might do this if you only want Managers to be able to share folders.
- To prevent shared drive members who have viewer or commenter access from downloading, copying, or printing files in shared drives, uncheck the fourth box. You might do this for organizational units that work with confidential data or projects.
Note: Files and folders in shared drives retain this setting when they're moved out of shared drives. In the case of folders, the setting can't be reverted after the file is in My Drive. - To prevent shared drive members with manager access from changing these default settings, uncheck the first box. In most cases, you might want to allow shared drive managers to change the access settings for a shared drive so that they aren’t prevented from collaborating with external users or other teams.
Note: If you change these settings later, only new shared drives are affected. Existing shared drives keep their current settings. You can update sharing settings for existing shared drives in the admin console.
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Click Save. If you configured a child organizational unit, you might be able to Inherit or Override a parent organizational unit's settings.
Changes can take up to 24 hours but typically happen more quickly. Learn more
