John Jonas compares Google Drive and OneDrive for controlling file access when working with remote staff. Google Drive lets you share by person or link, restrict to view-only, hide columns, or lock specific sheets. OneDrive adds time-limited access that expires automatically. Jonas warns that too many restrictions can signal distrust and slow down work, so staged access works better.
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Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS Online. Filipino specialists. This is episode 129, controlling access to data and files using Google Drive and Microsoft's OneDrive. So, given my last podcast, and it was about Filipinos don't want to steal your data, I still get the question. So let me talk to you about how you can protect some of your data. So one of the ways that you can have some degree of security with OFS is by controlling access to the files that they have access to and the information within specific files. We do this sometimes with Google, using Google Drive to share files with our team. If something isn't needed by people, we share it to specific people and not to others. Some things we share to everybody. So with Google Drive, we can control who gets access and then send it by a link. It's shared. It's super easy to deal with. And Google Drive has taken this taken security a little bit further recently, which is really nice. And if you need to, you can control accessing Google Sheets down to, like, specific cells. So I got an email recently from Tatiana who said she didn't want her bookkeeper to have to see her client's bank account numbers. And so she has a Google Google sheet where she's sharing the information and she can hide access to that column of bank account numbers so that her OFS doesn't see them. You can also give view access, but not edit access to things. You can also do this with specific sheets. In a Google Sheet, like you have multiple tabs. You can not give access to a specific tab so that they can see other things, but not that Microsoft 365. Previously it was called Office 365. They changed the name again. Now it's Microsoft 365 and they use their cloud services. OneDrive will also give you access to files and folders and sheets. There's all kinds of security access that you get with OneDrive. Your OFS also doesn't need to have Microsoft 365. They don't need to have a paid access to it. They're going to edit everything online. It's completely doable. So there is something that Microsoft has done that's taken things a step further than even Google has done, where you can give access and have things expire. Have access expire. So you can give access till a certain date and then automatically have it expire so you don't have to think about taking it away after that date. So now let me give just a word of caution. This is hard because people, I mean, there's two sides to this. There's the side where you have to protect your data, and there's the side of sowing distrust. And so just consider, Just consider the consequences of not giving access to things or trying to be super, super protective of things where your OFS recognizes that you don't trust them. And, you know, there's a time for that. And I get it. It does build distrust and it handicaps. It can handicap your ofs or it can take your time to. To control access to all these things. So just, Just a word of caution about it. You know, recognize that they don't want to steal your data and don't give access to everything in the beginning. But the more. The easier you can make your life. At least for me, the easier I can make my life, the better things run, the more effective I am, the better, the more money we make. Your industry is probably different than mine, though, so don't listen to anything that I say about this.
