Friday 17 June 2016

Google: Google Docs Allows You to Limit Access with An Expiration Date


In business, many people collaborate with clients, contractors and other small companies for a short length of time. You might want to give them access to some of your documents -- a list of your team's contact details, for instance -- and then revoke access once the job has been wrapped up. Well, Google is now starting to offer that feature to Google Apps customers that use Drive, Docs, Sheets and Slides. So when you share a file with someone, you'll also get the option to set an expiry date. Handy.

There is one caveat, however -- the person that's limited by the expiry date can only have view access. So if you want to given them permission to actually edit a Google Doc, you'll still need to go in and lock them out the old fashioned way at the end of the project. Still, for enterprise customers this should be a useful tool, and one more reason to consider Google's productivity suite over Microsoft Office. We just hope this eventually rolls out to all Google users, and not just those with Google Apps accounts.