Update: Google changed Incoming back to Shared with me.

Without even probably realizing it Google Drive have become an integral part of my day to day toolset, everyone in my company use it to share documents across teams & departments.

For a tool to be useful It is important that our workflow is as painless as possible, forgetting to share a document to someone or having a coworker unable to find a document can impacts the company productivity.

This get me to last week when one of my coworker asked me where was all the documents shared by the company on the drive, I was a bit baffled. Personally I always hit the “shared with me” button to look at company documents. But that tab was gone, he had the new interface. Goodbye “shared with me” tab, please welcome the incoming tab.

Unfortunately Incoming is much less useful than it’s predecessor. Instead of being a document drive it is a timeline of your sharing activity.

Worst, to have all those documents in one place you have to “move” them. Forget about moving all your documents at once, you will have to do it one by one & subject yourself to one quirky popup behaviour.

Considering you can have years of documents in there, that’s just an awful process to get through.

Why did google changed the shared with me tab?

What was so wrong with it? One possibility is that Google found out that in general people will look for the last item shared by co-workers & then the longer it has been shared, the more it become irrelevant.

That seems to be the behaviour that drive the new ui. You can also now choose items you want to move into your personal drive as opposite of having a bunch of things you are not using anymore.

However this is no excuse, Google should have a process to either import everything, or at least push a walkthrough the first time you open the new Incoming ui that let you import what you want, also explaining how this is gonna work for now on.

Source: Position Absolute