Posted by Chuck Coulson, Google Apps Technology Partnerships
Work today is very different from 10 years ago. Cloud computing, once a new idea, is abundantly available, and collaboration is possible across offices, cities, countries and continents.
Drive for Work enables collaboration and content sharing for businesses large and small and helps them share and access their files — even from different cloud applications.
Google Drive extends the reach of business applications by taking content that previously was only available in a single application, and making it available across multiple applications — all while maintaining security. For example:
- Marketing teams can create collateral in Drive that’s accessible for sales reps who spend time in a salesforce automation (SFA) app on their mobile phone.
- Support reps working in a helpdesk app can use Drive to share a customer-submitted error log with engineers.
- Accounts payable clerks working in an accounting app can generate an invoice and share the invoice directly with a vendor through Drive.
To help businesses gain more value from Drive for Work, we’ve partnered with leading Software as a Service (SaaS) application vendors to build deeper integrations with Google Drive. Here are a few examples:
- Freshdesk provides a customer support service that allows helpdesk agents and customers to attach videos, pdfs, screenshots and other files from Drive to their support tickets. (website; blogpost)
- Insightly provides a CRM system for small businesses that makes it easy to search or browse files in Drive and attach files to the relevant contact, organization, project or opportunity. (website; blogpost)
- MavenLink provides a project management system allowing Drive users to seamlessly share files in a collaborative project workspace with team members, contractors, and clients. (website; blogpost)
- Sage One, from The Sage Group plc, offers a small business accounting solution for businesses to manage their finances online, with invoices automatically backed up to Drive for easy sharing and access from any device. (website; blogpost)
- Smartsheet offers a project management platform where users can attach Drive files to a project so everything is in one place. (website; blogpost)
- Solve CRM, by Norada, has integrated with Drive so customers can use Google Sheets to manage and report on sales data. (website; blogpost)
- Xero provides online accounting for small businesses and integrates with Google Drive so employees can easily export and share reports. (website; blogpost)
- Zoho CRM, by Zoho, allows users to browse their documents from Drive and associate documents to customer information such as contacts, leads, accounts, activities, potentials, cases and more. (website)
And this is only the beginning. We’ll continue to work with our ecosystem so the most popular applications, and those that are most frequently used within our community, can help businesses store and access all of their content in Drive.
If you’re a developer and would like to learn more about our APIs that enable you to extend the functionality of the Google Apps platform check out
developers.google.com. For a list of cloud applications that integrate with Google Apps, please visit the
Google Apps Marketplace.
