This is some really exciting news and we are hopeful that this will help “drive” adoption of Google Drive, especially among our faculty/staff on campus who have been slower to take to it compared to our students (pun stolen from my dear colleague Mike Basile in Client Support).

Here’s the big news:

Drive for Education will be available to all Google Apps for Education customers at no charge and will include:

• Unlimited storage: No more worrying about how much space you have left or about which user needs more gigabytes. Drive for Education supports individual files up to 5TB in size and will be available in coming weeks.
• Vault: Google Apps Vault, our solution for search and discovery for compliance needs, will be coming free to all Apps for Education users by the end of the year.
• Enhanced Auditing: Reporting and auditing tools and an Audit API easily let you see the activity of a file, are also on the way.

Imagine a lighter-weight storage eco-system at Stony Brook where we ditch MySBfiles and department shared folders and move everything into Google Drive!  All your files accessible from anywhere with an Internet connection, from any device 🙂

So smart of Google to market it as the 21st Century Backpack for Students.

Tell us what you think, IT Partners!  Will this help solve some problems for you and your users???  Will our researchers LOVE this?