Google Opens Early Adopter Program for Team Drives, Acquires Qwiklabs

Google is moving towards making it easier for companies to use its cloud storage with more team-friendly features. Also this week, Google announced its acquisition of Qwiklabs, a company that provides hands-on lab learning environments for cloud platforms. 

Team Drives

According to an announcement on Monday, Google is now accepting applications for its Early Adopter Program (EAP) for the Team Drives feature in Google Drive, which it announced back in September. The EAP is only open to G Suite Business and Education customers.

Google says that Team Drives are shared spaces where teams can store files and the team’s work collectively, which means if a document’s creator moves off of the team the document doesn’t go with them. This kind of feature is important if Google is going to continue to pursue enterprise clients in its cloud business.

Team Drive also helps with onboarding, because every person who is added to a Team Drive has instant access to the documents.

Advanced access controls prevent team members from accidentally removing or deleting files that others need, Google says.

Qwiklabs

​In an effort to boost the training available for its cloud platform, Google announced this week that it has acquired Qwiklabs. The company, founded in 2012, ” offers step-by-step instructions to learn a popular cloud service, test different use cases and train your teams to become cloud experts,” Google says. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The only curious part of the deal is the fact that Qwiklabs currently doesn’t offer training for Google Cloud, but does highlight lots of educational materials for its competitor AWS.

“With Qwiklabs, we’re closing the IP skills gap in the cloud. More than half a million users have collectively spent over 5 million hours learning how to successfully deploy and manage multiple cloud technologies through the Qwiklabs platform,” Jason Martin, Google Cloud Director, Professional Services, said. “We’re focused on offering the most comprehensive, efficient, and fun way to train and onboard people across all our products on Google Cloud, including Google Cloud Platform and G Suite.”

“We want to help businesses get the most out of their cloud investment and, with Qwiklabs, we’ll give users a place to learn and expand their cloud skills to deliver more innovation, more features and more efficiency for their customers.”