Extract from Dave Ruel’s article “Messy Metadata: More Challenges With Collecting Data From Google Workspace”
Knowledge workers may never go back to the office as we once knew it. But, now that companies and their employees have learned how well working from home can work—both for maintaining productivity and workers’ quality of life—remote work is unquestionably here to stay.
For many offices, Google Workspace is one of the tools that enabled the transition to a fully remote workforce. Google provides outstanding version control, tremendous data storage capacity, and effortless collaboration on shared documents.
Of course, the data that businesses generate on Google Workspace is potentially discoverable. For this reason, Google created a tool—Google Vault—that ostensibly helps organizations preserve and collect files relevant to litigation. But identifying, preserving, and collecting Google Workspace files using Google Vault presents several challenges.
Google Vault Limitations
I’ve written in more depth about some of these issues before. To recap, Google Vault can lead organizations to over-collect data because of the way it organizes and presents file information. Google Vault currently doesn’t allow any visualization of a user’s Google or Shared Drive structure, so there’s no way to navigate specific files easily.Â
