Where a Small Firm's Files Actually Live: Firmspace Storage, Google Drive and OneDrive in One List
Ask three people in a small firm where the contract with the biggest customer is, and you get three different answers: in the mailbox, in a folder on somebody's laptop, in a chat thread. The file exists — the answer does not. Firmspace CRM does not solve this by ordering everyone to move years of documents into one place. It solves it by keeping one list of documents, while the files themselves may live in three different places.
The documents section in the CRM holds three kinds of items. The first are files uploaded into the CRM itself. The second are files that remain in Google Drive. The third are files that live in OneDrive. For the person looking for a contract they look like one list with tabs, not like three products stitched together.
The difference between the three is not cosmetic, it is where the file physically sits. An uploaded file is stored by the CRM. A Drive file is stored by Google: the CRM keeps the link, the name, the size, the modification date and who brought the file in. That is why connected Drive and OneDrive documents are shown separately and counted separately — they take space in their own service, not in the plan.
Space is counted honestly. A firm's plan sets how many megabytes of files and photos it may keep, and the counter includes only the files that actually lie with us: those rows where the CRM holds the bytes itself. A file that is merely a link to Drive does not eat the quota, and the interface shows used space against the allowance so the number is never a surprise.
There is also a hard limit per file: one uploaded file may be up to four megabytes, and a larger one is refused with a clear message instead of failing halfway. The list of what may not be uploaded at all is short and honest: executables and scripts — .exe, .msi, .bat, .cmd, .com, .scr, .vbs, .ps1, .sh, .jar, .dll, .apk, .app. Everything a normal office deals with — contracts, invoices, scans, photos of receipts, spreadsheets, presentations — goes in.
Folders work as a tree, the way people already keep papers: a folder inside a folder, unlimited nesting. Two folders in the same place may not share a name — the CRM says so right away instead of quietly creating a twin, because two identical folder names are exactly how a document archive rots. Folders have their own ceiling: up to five hundred per user.
If the firm has been working in Google Drive for years, nothing has to be dragged by hand. The CRM can import the files a person already has on Drive. Folders are not mirrored — the structure of Drive stays where it is, the CRM takes the files. Shortcuts are not carried over either: a shortcut is a pointer to another file, and there is nothing to move. The import walks the Drive in pages and takes up to two hundred files per run; a second run picks up the rest, so a large Drive is moved over several passes rather than in one nervous click.
The important part is what happens on the second run. Every imported file is recognised by its Drive identifier, and a file that is already in the CRM is skipped. Running the import twice does not create a second copy of the same contract — a detail that matters more than it sounds, because a duplicated price list or a duplicated signed page in a customer file is worse than a missing one.
Disconnecting Drive is not the same as deleting. If a firm stops using Google, already created documents stay in the CRM and their links keep working. The CRM even counts how many documents point at Google files and warns about it in advance, so nobody discovers the consequence after pressing the button. There is a second cloud in the same section — OneDrive — with its own tab when it is connected.
A separate question is who may see a file. Documents are personal: a document row belongs to the person who uploaded or imported it, and the folders are theirs as well. So the answer to 'where is the document' becomes precise: not 'somewhere in the shared drive', but a concrete list with an owner and a timestamp. That is what makes the next step possible.
The next step is reading without opening. The AI assistant can search uploaded files by name, find the right one and read the text of a PDF — not Google Docs, Sheets or Slides, and not images: for now, uploaded PDFs only. With a PDF in hand it can summarise a document, or pull out the fields of an employment contract — the employee's name, the contract type, the start date — and propose saving them to the employee's profile. The employee card is still saved by a person: the assistant proposes, the person confirms.
That is the quiet point of all this plumbing. A small firm does not suffer from a lack of storage. It suffers from not being able to answer a simple question: where is it, who has it, and what does it say. One list covering the CRM's own storage, Drive and OneDrive, with honest counters and an honest list of refusals, turns that question from a search expedition into a two-second lookup. Connect Drive from the secure connection form — the CRM never asks for a password in the chat.