My name is Charlene and I'm addicted to Google Docs. It is the answer to many of my frustrations with collaborative writing. If you have worked with me at all, you will have noticed that I pretty much refuse to email you an attachment - I will put it on the common drive or suggest that we create a Google Doc. This all started a long time ago when people I worked with were obsessed with emailing documents around, but then sometimes forgot to save the attachment to their computer after making a bunch of edits. And then the hair pulling and teeth gnashing would ensue when the edits and the documents were lost. I also just prefer that we are all working from the same document and not have various versions floating around.
Of course, the trouble with group editing a Word document saved on a common drive is that only one person at a time can be editing. Enter Google Docs. But the trouble with this is that the document is in the evil cloud and not on our servers that are regularly backed up. So I always make sure to save a copy of an important GDoc to our network. This is really easy - go to File, then Download as Word (or text, pdf, etc) and then save it wherever you want.
There are certainly pros and cons to each product - more functionality in Word, but GDocs saves previous versions. There may be a good solution out there for the best of both worlds with Google Cloud Connect:
Google Cloud Connect is a free plugin that improves Microsoft Office 2003, 2007 and 2010 on Windows PCs. It adds simultaneous collaboration, revision history, cloud sync, unique URLs and simple sharing to the Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint applications
http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2011/02/google-cloud-connect-for-microsoft.html
It was just launched last week, so I have just downloaded onto my home computer but not tried it out - I'll let you know.
UPDATE - the Google Cloud thing is not getting good reviews http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/03/hands-on-google-cloud-connect-for-office-not-ready-for-prime-time.ars
Office 2010 apparently has group editing functionality. I know people use Dropbox but I'd still rather save my work here at work and not out there.
I'm sorry to hear that Google cloud connect isn't turning out to be that great - I actually got a little excited when I read about it in your post! Maybe future versions will be better...
ReplyDeleteThe beauty of Dropbox is that your documents aren't just "in the cloud"; they are everywhere. The LSIT nerds use it to synchronize important server information between us. Whenever a change is made, the update magically updates itself on my work machine, John's work machine, my laptop at home, John's Android phone, ....
ReplyDeleteI'm wondering how Google Cloud Connect will turn out as well. You'll have to let me know what you think of it. (I noted it in my week 4 post too.)
ReplyDeleteI have become much more wary of information "in the cloud" these days - so I know what you mean. With the demise of delicious (although I'm still not sure what's happening with it), and then 40,000 Gmail users losing the entire contents of their email accounts, I'm starting to think more about backing stuff up. I've always thought of my Gmail account as a semi back-up already. How does one back up an entire email account?
Leah, Backupify (http://www.backupify.com/) is a paid service that claims to backup your Gmail (as well as others like Twitter and Facebook). I don't know much about them; they were mentioned on one of the podcasts I listen to as part of that Google story you mentioned. I'm personally too cheap to pay for a service like that, but I guess it depends on how important your gmail is.
ReplyDeleteThanks Darryl - I'll look into that!
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