Here at Coda we’ve gotten a lot of feedback on on our Google login and Drive integration, mainly requests to support other ways of logging in and to manage files. We’d love to learn more so we are asking for the community’s help. Any answers to these questions would be super appreciated as we further explore this space.
Do you use actively Google Drive to organize and share your Coda docs?
If Coda supported its own folders (in place of the flat list now), would you still use Drive integration to organize?
If you’d still use Google Drive, would you expect sharing Coda Docs directly from Drive to still work, or would you be fine if you’d have to share docs and folders from Coda directly?
Also open to any other thoughts or suggestions. Thanks!
Just one suggestion, why not to use the Coda suggestion / voting template - adding all active users of this community to this file and start really to understand the magic of Coda and get proper data for decision making.
Just one main point to Google Drive.
Many IT departments have in their policies limited or forbidden to use cloud services not controlled by them. (Might be influenced by Microsoft). Therefore it would be great to have more options, not to limit Coda’s usage / potential growth.
I do use GDrive to organize my files. It took a little time for me to adjust, but I am happy with it now. When creating docs, I just take a moment to go to GoogleDrive and create them from there, in the proper structure I want. I do think, however, that Coda should allow setting the default folder in GDrive so that docs don’t pile up in the root folder, which I don’t believe anyone actually wants. Of course the root folder would be the default, but the ability to change it would solve a lot of people’s issues, in my opinion.
I would still use GDrive to organize my docs now that I have a system in place. Although perhaps if Coda supported organization I would have done that from the start. Now, I like my system. Since changing my perspective on Coda docs, I like that they are stand-alone files. This way, I can create files knowing where they should always be. Restricting my options would feel like something being stripped away from me, but perhaps necessary in the hunt to give the masses what they want.
I didn’t even know you could share files from GDrive… Given the complexity behind how you share docs, including the options you can grant people (view, edit, and play), I don’t think sharing directly from GDrive is a good idea. Perhaps sharing from GDrive directly is obvious in that anyone with the actual file has maximum sharing rights, but also perhaps not.
I don’t particularly like that Coda docs don’t appear to have any size within my GDrive. It makes me think that the data is stored on some offsite server and is not actually protected by my GDrive backups. If the data could somehow be stored in the files themselves, this would make me feel better.
I use Coda in two organizations, and both of them use G Suite to share documents. Being able to drop a Coda document in a folder, and have it automatically be shared with everyone who has access to that folder, is just perfect - matches how every other document in Google Drive works. In my current situation, I would not want it any other way.
However, I have had to explain to more than one person that when granting permission to Coda to access G Suite, Coda can only access files opened or created with it, and not all the files - I think people would be more trusting with security if Coda would not require any Google Drive integration and only used Google accounts for login.
It is very good that @oleg started this discussion!
In our case, we are quite used to GDrive folder structure and sharing. We would prefer if the CODA docs inherit the sharing settings from GDrive folders and benefit from all additional sharing options.
In terms of access, the 2 things that we are missing so far are:
a) set individual or group or with link access rights to specific sections in a Coda doc. My best suggestion is that there is an easy way to create something like a Table of Contents for all sections in a table and in that table set the access rights for every section. (might go to the level of tables, if really necessary).
b) More importantly! we lack the option to allow users to fill in data in specific columns and rows. Every column with formula should be locked for most users. Basically, if there is an option for them to be unable to click/see:
As well as header rows be non-editable for them:
That should solve any access restrictions for us.
On a separate note, I would like to say that we have a number of contracts and NDAs and they all restrict us from using various technologies. It is fairly easy to convince a client and lawyers that we need to use Google products for our operations. It however, is an absolute nightmare to convince them to use any lesser known tools and technology. So I vote with all limbs for keeping the access as much as possible under the Google infrastructure and regulations.
