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Institution-level feature — managed from your institution dashboard at deandesk.com/dashboard. Files in the Shared Drive are private to your institution.
The Shared Drive is a file manager attached to your institution. Files you upload here become context that the Institution AI Chat can search and read when answering questions or drafting communications. Use the Shared Drive to give the assistant access to documents like:
  • Member handbooks and policies
  • School handbooks
  • Event flyers and program descriptions
  • Internal reference docs (FAQs, runbooks, year-end procedures)
  • Templates for letters and announcements

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Open the Shared Drive

Go to Shared Drive in the institution dashboard sidebar. You’ll see a folder browser with two scopes:

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Folders

Pick a scope (institution or school), then create folders within it. Folders can be nested arbitrarily deep, so you can group files however your team needs — for example, Member Handbook → 2026 → Appendices. Files live inside any folder.
1

Pick a scope

Click Institution or pick a specific school from the scope selector.
2

Create a folder

Click New Folder, give it a name (e.g. “Member Handbook”, “2026 Camp Materials”), and save.
3

Open the folder

Click the folder to see its contents.

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Uploading files

1

Open a folder

Navigate into the folder where you want the file.
2

Upload

Click Upload and select up to 10 files at once. PDFs, Word documents, plain text, Markdown, and common image formats are supported.
3

Wait for indexing

DeanDesk extracts the text content from each file so it can be searched by the assistant. Indexing usually takes a few seconds per file.

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Inline text files

You can also create text files directly in the browser without uploading — useful for quick notes, FAQs, or templates.
1

Click New Text File

Inside any folder, click New Text File.
2

Compose

Enter a name and write the content directly in the editor.
3

Save

Save. The text file is indexed immediately.

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Previewing files

Click any file to preview its content in the right panel. Text is shown as-is; PDFs and Word documents are shown as their extracted text representation.

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Deleting files

To remove a file from the assistant’s context, delete it from its folder. Deleted files are removed immediately and the assistant will no longer reference them.

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How the assistant uses Shared Drive content

When you ask the Institution AI Chat a question, the assistant searches the Shared Drive for relevant content and cites which files it pulled from. You can ask follow-up questions like:
  • “Summarize the cancellation policy from our member handbook.”
  • “Draft a member announcement following the tone of the welcome letter in the templates folder.”
  • “Look up what the 2026 Camp Materials say about parent waivers.”
Files in the Shared Drive never leave your institution — they’re not shared with other DeanDesk customers and they’re not used to train any model.