How to Set Expiration Dates for Shared Google Drive Files

In today’s busy world communication and connection is the base of every business relationship. You can never function your businesses separately or in isolation. Today the employees not only work with each other but they also have to deal with third party vendors, clients, customers and other businesses either on temporary basis or for long time. In order to keep your company’s information safe and secure in all situations Google has introduced a new feature of “expiration date” for some particular user access to files in Google Drive, Docs, Sheets and Slides.

Sharing Files/Folders on Google Drive:

Everytime you share a file or folder in Google Drive with another user, the shared links will work forever until and unless you manually change the sharing permissions.Like, if you have shared a document with an external user, they’ll continue to have access to the file long after your business contract may have ended. Say for example, your company hires an outside contractor for a project for a time duration of three months. To finish the job, the contractor needs to see a spreadsheet that includes the contact information of your employees.

After the launch, you can share your employees’ list in sheets with the contractor, give them view access only and fix that access to expire when their contract does in three months. If the contractor tries to access the spreadsheet after 3 months, he can’t.

Denying Access to Files Beyond Deadlines:

Alongwith the Information Rights Management (IRM) features with this expiration functionality that was launched last July, should precisely increase the security of your company’s documents and information. An important point to note here is, you can only set expiration dates for users with comment or view access.

You cannot set expiration dates for file owners or users with edit access. However, the one thing you should take care about is, the person who is limited with this expiry date should only have view access.

In case, one wants to give them the access to modify a Google Doc, it is important to go in and lock them out the old fashioned way at the end of the project. Then again, for many companies this tend to be a very important and useful tool and will give you an important reason to think about Google’s productivity suite rather than Microsoft Office.

How to set an expiration date for Google Docs, sheers, Slides and Google Drive.

When the file or document reaches an expiration date, the user cannot access that particular file or documents. the objective of this new feature is to increase the security of your information and data. One cannot set an expiration date for file owners or collaborators with edit access. Given below are the steps one has to follow to set an expiration date. These are as follows:

• Firstly open the Google drive or sheets or slides. Now click on the Share button, and then select the advanced option.
• In the Shared Settings area, click on the drop down menu placed next to the name of each collaborator and now select Set expiration.
• Under the Access expires, choose the number of days like 7 days, 10 days or 30 days after which the document will expire.

Setting Auto-expiry Date for Google Drive’s Shared Links:

Google drive allows you to set an expiration dates for all shared links but this option is only available for those who have paid Google App for Work accounts. However if you don’t have a paid Google account you can definitely create temporary links that will auto expire after some time. In order to do that follow the steps given below:

• Go to labnol.org/expire and then authorize the web app to access your Google Drive.
• Now, open the File Picker and select any file or folder in the Google Drive that you want to share.
• Type one or more email addresses separated by comma of users who will be given read only or viewer access or read and write access or editor access to your file.
• The final step, mention the time period after which the access should be limited. It can be 5 hours, 5 days or even 5 years.
• Select the “Set Expiration” button and your work is done. The Google script will set a time based trigger that will automatically remove the mentioned user or users from the access list after the given date and time.
• The Google Drive Auditor can also be used as an add-on to monitor the shared permissions of every file present in google drive and know who can see your files. Now let me brief about Google Drive Auditor.

A google Drive Auditor creates a brief privacy report of shared permissions and access settings of all files in your Google Drive. It scans all the files and folders in your Google Drive and prepares an audit report stating who has shared access to the file in Google Drive and what level of permissions they have. This auto expiry app enlists all the files and folders that are set to expire after a given period of time. You can simply click on the “cancel” link against any Drive link to prevent that shared link from expiring automatically.