Lucidchart integrates with Google Drive

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I'll admit it: I'm afraid of change. Well, 'afraid' might be the wrong word... lackadaisical? Yep, I'm lackadaisical about change. And I'm not alone--there's been plenty of online kvetching about the transition of Google Docs to Google Drive. Just a few weeks ago, those Gmail accounts that hadn't yet transferred from Google Docs over to Drive were forced to make the switch. Some of these people claim privacy concerns as the reason for their reticence, but it seems like many folks just don't want to embrace change. Google Docs worked fine, they argue, so why the switch?

One consideration is the upgrade in storage space. Google Drive offers 5 GB of free storage space, which certainly trumps the previous 2 GB limit in Google Docs. Another advantage is that with Drive, you can simply drop documents into a folder on your desktop and retrieve them anytime, anywhere. Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Google's Chrome and Apps projects, explains, "You can take all your data, regardless of which device you're on, and make it seamlessly available to you. We want you to think of this as the center of your Google apps experience."

One rough patch that is still being worked out with Drive is the integration of the Google application marketplace. The Google Apps marketplace allows business to access apps for their Google apps domain account. If your admin has done that, you can sign in to an app directly from your Google app domain account. Google is still debating how to treat Google Drive. Currently it resides in the Chrome webstore and if there is any potential integration between the Drive account and Google App you have to manually do that by going to the chrome webstore after the app has already been installed on your account. There are a bunch of apps out there that have Google Apps and Google Drive functionality so it takes twice as long to install but for Google Drive functioanlity it may be worth the wait.

There are still people that argue that Google Apps isn't ready for prime time. In some use cases, that might be true. If you are emailing out a document where people really care about presentation, Google Docs can sometimes look like it was taken to 90% completion of a enterprise product and then they moved on, but for those people that live within a Google ecosystem and just want to get things done, it is the best solution out there. You also can't ignore that it is a much cheaper solution that Microsoft products and requires little to no maintenance from IT staff.




Once the app is installed, you'll see Lucidchart listed under Create → More in Google Drive. You can use this feature to create new Lucidchart documents, in the same way that you start new Google documents or spreadsheets. For other questions, please see our Google Drive documentation.

For months, our customers have asked for tighter integration with Google and we're excited to deliver it. Let us know what you think!

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