At my job we use Google Docs (via Google Apps) for internal collaborative documents and archives. One big issue with this platform is that when new folks are hired/given accounts and they go to view “All documents”– lo, and behold! it is empty. That’s right, if you go to “All items” and select Visibility -> YOURCOMPANY under More options as the filter, you will still only get “No items matched your selections”. This despite there potentially being thousands of documents that should fit your criterion.
As it happens these views only get populated based on creation or modification dates. In other words, new users only get to see documents that are modified or created after their account was created. By “see” I only mean visibility of the existence of documents in the Docs index interfaces and searches. The user can still view a document directly if they are sent a direct link (assuming they have permission). But the fact that you can’t even see documents you have permission to see in searches until they are modified is just insane. Google support verified this was a “feature”, and their reasoning is that in larger organizations new employees might be overwhelmed by a huge list of documents, things would be too hard to find. So the solution is to make it difficult to find anything!
Until the time when Google realizes this is annoying and silly, here’s a quick and easy (albeit not permanent) hack for this situation. Create a new collection (helpful: name = creation date) and add all current documents to it. This step counts as a modification to all the documents, and thus they will then appear in the list of all docs! The annoying bit is that next time you make a user you have to do the same thing.
This hack might not be feasible if you have high hundreds or especially thousands of documents, I am sorry to say. As far as I can tell you can’t drag more than 40-60 of them at once or it throws an error. If you do it in chunks it works fine though.
Lastly, perhaps you dislike messy lists of things you no longer need and want to remove the previous collection when a new user comes on and you create a new one. If you do that by simply deleting the collection you will also delete all documents in the collection! Really Google? You couldn’t add a damned checkbox to confirm the removal of child documents or just the collection container? Anyway, if you really care that much then there is a way. Click on one document, hold Shift and click on another document slightly past the bottom of your screen (after scrolling). This should be a reasonable number for your chunk size. Then hover over one of the selected documents, click Actions on the right, and click Organize. Here you can select the new collection to add them to it and deselect the old one so they aren’t in it. Once you are done going through all your docs the old collection should be empty and you can remove it safely. My approach is to create them with a name based on the date and just never remove them. If your users heavily leverage collections you might need to reconsider this.
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