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.
Does Google Drive sync with Local Folders? e.g. I have a folder called work (c:/work). I drag that folder to Google Drive Desktop, it syncs. Thereafter I create a new file in (c:/work). Will Google Drive sync that new file, or must I drag it into Google Drive Folder manually.
Not in that way. The desktop portion of Google Drive works essentially the same way as Dropbox: There is a special folder (usually called "Google Drive") in your file system. Whatever you add to that is synced with Google Drive. Whatever you remove from there is removed from Google Drive and no longer synced.
If somehow I lose all my files on Google Drive Web. When I login to the Desktop Application, will it sync and remove all my files, or will it sync the files in the Desktop App back into the web account.
How would you "lose all your files"?
If you remove the files yourself via the web interface, then, yes, they'll be removed from your desktop file system (assuming your PC is running and the app can connect to the Internet). However, they should be in your "Trash" folder so you can recover them.
How else would you lose them via the web? If you lose access to your account then the desktop sync app won't be able to log in and sync your files, so they shouldn't be touched.
There's not really a "login" to the desktop app after you've set it up. It runs in the background and you don't really interact with it directly. (Again, very similar to how Dropbox works.)
Are there any other limitations as well as more efficient methods of using Google Drive for my work?
That's rather subjective and not really answerable. We don't know how you work.
You should have a look at Google Drive in the Help Center.
Best Answer
Short answer
AFAIK, no, thumbnails are not created by an external site, but Google uses a lot of websites to host their services. I don't know the specific one for thumbnails but to avoid this and other problems consider to unblock all the ones listed in the help article regarding regarding the firewall and proxy settings for Google Drive. Below is the link that article and the current content.