If you are sharing documents often with the same group or individual, it may be useful to setup a shared collection. A shared collection is a collection that exists in the doclist and appears for everyone that has access to it - much the same as a shared document.

If you add documents to a shared collection, the collection is automatically shared with everyone who has access to the shared collection, with the same access level. For example, if students had only view access to the “Assignments” shared collection, students could only view every document that was added to that collection. However, if a teacher had edit access to the “Assignments” shared collection, that teacher could edit every document that was added to that collection.

The advantage of a shared collection with Groups is that you do not need to send an email notifications or post a document URLs on a site – especially useful if you are not using Apps mail for your school domain. Because the shared collection will always appear in a user’s doclist, every time a new document is added they will have access to it - regardless of whether they have opened the document yet or not.

Shared collections can then act as a common place to collect files for groups or with a teammate. You can include any kind of file that exists in Google Docs.