Google Storage for Developers: Sharing with Groups

Last month we introduced Google Storage for Developers with support for sharing with Google account holders. Today, we are enabling support for sharing with groups, giving you greater control and flexibility over how you share your data.

You can now easily share your Google Storage data with groups of users as well as individuals. Here are some examples of the things you can do with group sharing:

• Share data with an entire department or mailing list
• Make data publicly readable, but editable only by a group within your company
• Keep access controls consistent with the current membership of a team
• Add or remove a user's access to shared data via a single group membership change without having to change access control lists (ACLs) on all the buckets and objects involved.

You can share with groups by adding one or more Google Groups to the ACL of a bucket or object. A group member can be anyone with a Google Account, and members can authenticate using either their Google Storage credentials or in an authenticated browser session.

You can find more details on the new group sharing feature here. We have also updated our GSUtil command-line tool to support group sharing.

Thanks to everyone who has tested Google Storage so far. As always, we appreciate your feedback. Please let us know what you think on the Google Storage forum.

By Jessie Jiang, Google Storage for Developers Team