G Suite Google Drive – Cannot Share Folders

Re your point 2 You are heading in the same direction my company has gone. We have the equivalent of your 'Central System' as a Username, and have created three folders on its Drive - WORK, REFERENCE, EXTERNAL USERS - and shared them with our Sysadmin. Sysadmin shared WORK with Users on an Edit basis and our users built a sub-folder structure for our company to hold all our working files. Sysadmin shared REFERENCE with most Users on Read basis but with some Users granted Edit rights so they could create and maintain the folder/file structure for policy documents, manuals etc.

WORK is shared Edit and REFERENCE is shared Read to new starters as part of the User setup process and new Users immediately acquire inherited rights to all the contents of these folders.

Leavers, we change the User password immediately, use administration advanced tools to transfer ownership to their manager/colleague for any files/folders they may have created and then unshare them from WORK and REFERENCE.

We have not made WORK or REFERENCE to be the Owner of the sub-folders and documents which they contain because it would require that only someone logged into Central System would be able to delete them. We simply use our own version of Central System to provide a unified data structure for our Users. The Users each retain the 5gb of non-Gdocs storage space which is shared with other Users through WORK and REFERENCE.

We collaborate with external organisations and use EXTERNAL USERS as a portal. For example, our Auditors want access to our some of the data on our system. We created a sub-folder AUDITACCESS in the EXTERNAL ACCESS folder and granted our auditors' gmail accounts Read access to AUDITACCESS. We then use the Organise function to give them a View towards the files and folders which they need to access (but remember to hold the CTRL key down when you use the Organise function). This allows us to un-Organise files and folders, if necessary, since they are all listed in the AUDITACCESS folder and to un-share AUDITACCESS with our auditors email accounts, if necessary.

Hope this will give you a few ideas for organising your own system.

It is possible to have a shared folder among employees of your organization so that everyone can use it to share files with one another without having the need of clicking on the "Share" link for individual files.

From the Support Page regarding what the "Incoming" and "Shared with me" buttons do:

The "Incoming" or "Shared with me" view in the left-hand side navigation lets you see the files and folders that other people have shared with you, beginning with the most recent.

Your organisation can then share a central folder with everyone in the organisation and use it to store files that would be available for everyone. Individual users would then receive a notification regarding the folder that has been shared to them, which they can then click on it to be directed to a special page that previews the items located within the folder. A blue button on the top right of the page can be clicked to add the shared folder to the person's individual drive.

More information about the sharing of files inside folders:

Moving a file or folder from a shared folder into My Drive (or any other folder) is a move and not a copy, so the moved content is removed from the shared folder. As a result:

• Users will no longer see the moved files or folders in the shared folder.
• Any permissions on the moved content that were inherited from the shared folder will be removed, and new permissions will be inherited from the destination folder (together with permissions explicitly set on a file or folder).