The other day I decided to try out Google Apps. I work with a few remote developers and it seemed that looking into Apps was worth my time. After trying it out for a few days, I'm considering using this tool as our developer document manager.
Google Apps basically wraps a bunch of Google's online applications under an umbrella of an organization or company. All users under this umbrella can email each other, share calendars, documents, and a few other things.
For the most part, I am only interested in the Docs application. It allows you to store documents, share them with other users, keeps a history of changes, and you can edit the documents directly in the browser. Oh, and don’t forget you can export those documents to your computer in a number of different formats (MS Office, Open Office, PDF, HTML, etc). Currently it can handle: word processing (Word), spreadsheets (Excel), and presentations (PowerPoint).
I have a few complaints – the document organizer doesn’t allow you to share folders. In fact, folders might as well be tags, because they are only useful for organizing things for yourself (your folders do not show up for other users in your system).
I would love to introduce this kind of tool to my client, but I already know the answer. They would want to own the content by hosting the Google Apps application on their own intranet server and I can’t blame them. Keeping an application like this behind a company firewall makes everyone feel a little safer. I started to look around for some sort of equivalent online document editor, but I can’t seem to find anything that allows you to use it on your own server.
In fact, I haven’t even found any open source tools for editing documents online at all. I’m kind of surprised, because this kind of functionality could be a huge addition to other projects. Imagine an open source online document editor like Google Apps that could be used in other projects. Wikis could use the document editor object to allow users to easily edit pages instead of coming up with these strange markup languages. Heck, shouldn’t Google be using their own Doc App within Blogger? It seems much better than Blogger’s online editor.
I heard the other day that Microsoft will be creating their own online Office tools. One would hope that they would incorporate this technology within SharePoint. I can’t stand opening documents that are stored in SharePoint, it takes forever and seems like such a hack to save the open document back to the server. Of course I heard they will require the user to have Office installed on their local computer. I guess this shouldn’t be a huge deal for corporate users, but you can’t help but think that this is just another limitation that will cause the tool to be useless.
I guess I’ll just take the "wait and see" route until something better comes along.
In my opinion Google Docs is an application bundle with huuuge potential (speaking collaboration) and I use it frequently. However despite all "Don't be evil" claims - for my company I'd love to host the suite on my own server and not have it hosted on a cloud in the middle of no- and everywhere. Does anyone know: is GD actually closed source or is there a possibility to get the suite somewhere?
ReplyDeleteCompared with MS Office GD is for me clearly the leader. Collaboration being the killer-feature, I also love the fact that you don't even get the chance to loose time fighting with fancy bloated formatting tools you don't really need. Document structure and content are far more important than all the bells and whistles. Layouted documents for print and marketing are better left to designers and other software.
Can't agree more that Google needs to explore making this functionality available, possibly even as an appliance similar to their standalone search and earth systems. Used GD for the first time tonight, and my first thought was, "We could REALLY use this functionality, but my employer will never allow to post confidential docs on a public web."
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