The agony of having to collaborate with people using email attachments is widespread. You receive an email from someone with an Excel workbook attached and need to make edits before sending it back. Now, you have to save the file, make your edits, and then reattach it to a new email. I’ve done this and gone back and forth with colleagues several times to finish a document or a spreadsheet. If you use Google Drive, you can share a document or a spreadsheet and take advantage of all the collaboration features built in, but the share functionality has no way of including a message to the person who the file is shared with. You only have the hope that they know what is being shared with them.
Google has responded to that hope by changing how Google Drive works. In October, Google released to beta its new compose experience in Gmail. The new compose creates a popup window within Gmail (similar to chats); the benefit of this addition is that you can look at other emails for reference while composing a new email. In the blog post announcing the new compose experience, Google promised more new features on the horizon to appear in the compose window. And that leads us to Google’s announcement this week of one of those new features. In a blog post on the Official Gmail Blog is an announcement of new Gmail and Drive functionality, allowing users to insert and share files from their Drive without leaving the compose window. If that were the only takeaway, this wouldn’t be such a big deal and only come across as little more than a new way to share Google Docs. But this is for all file types in Google Drive, including PDFs and non-Google Doc files you can store in your Drive. This means that after you place a file in your Drive and insert it into an email using the handy icon at the bottom of your compose window, if you update that file — be it a PDF, a photo, or any other file type that Drive can store — the recipient’s previous email will always show the most up-to-date file. You can also upload a file to your Drive directly from that same icon in an email’s compose window.
Not to be outdone and making the move two weeks earlier, Dropbox announced on its blog a new function called Dropbox Chooser. Chooser is a new JavaScript component that enables web applications to retrieve files from a user’s Dropbox and links to those files without having to worry about a file browser, authentication, or uploading and storage. Collaboration tools, such as Asana project management, can link to files in a Dropbox and files remain up-to-date.
These advancements in cloud storage and collaboration make perfect sense, which can make you wonder why they haven’t existed before. Hopefully, these two welcome additions are signs of a shift in how we more efficiently collaborate and utilize the proliferating amount of cloud storage available.
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