I retired from personal blogging in July 2008 but you can find me over at blog.xero.com
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Posted by rod@drury.net.nz in Google at 2:47 pm on Tuesday, 8 July 2008
I’ve been trying to use Google Docs in anger over the past week and found some huge limitations.
Documents are shared individually. There are no team folders.
You would think that once you set up a domain everyone in your team would be able to see a folder structure of shared documents. Nope.
Again, surprising how the really big smart companies miss out doing even the basics well.
blog
Adobe is trying to get into the team collaboration space. You should check out the beta of Acrobat.com (www.acrobat.com funnily enough). I did a preliminary review the other week and wrote about it here: http://www.businessday.co.nz/blogs/playingtowin/2008/06/23/acrobat-on-line/.
This is true for Google Docs Rod, but then it was (I don’t think) ever intended to be a team collaboration tool.
That said Google Apps (for domains) offers nearly identical tools but most definitely DOES afford team sharing and does it quite well, especially now that Google Sites offers up Wiki integration with Google Docs.
that should have read “…was not (I don’t think) ever…”
Not sure that’s correct. We are using Google Apps. Folders are private and you need to invite everybody into each doc. Even if you go ALL it explodes to all individual users, so if a new user comes in you need to reshare.
Fair enough, obviously been a while since I looked at the folder sharing in Google Apps then - it doesn’t exist.
If you select ALL it seems to add them all to the collaborators for me and at the bottom of the sharing settings it does offer up the ability to allow anyone in the domain the ability to view or edit the document - that way if someone new is added to the domain this setting will pick up that new user just fine.
The biggest annoyance I can see with this is the contact grouping, if I create a group in gmail then docs picks it up, but groups created in docs don’t appear in gmail for me. That is dumb.
So no folder level sharing (which I agree would make sense to be able to setup even if it’s at an admin level) but the document sharing seems solvable for new users.
I appreciate the leading subject line (worked, got me leaving a comment) however, Google Docs is a team collaboration tool.
Are you perhaps asking for it to collaborate differently?
That’s different.
Rod, it just shows you 2 things.
1) Everything does not work well for business users in the cloud because cloud based software does not offer the same richness of some software that apps on the desktop offer. Lots of these cloud based apps have a long way to go. And this does not include poor quality Internet connections like we get in NZ.
2) Google is smart with search and maps but I am far from convinced of anything else that is business or industrial strength.
One thing about Google I find incredibly annoying when travelling is - if in Spain for example it takes you to Google.es or .co.es. They make assumption that they shouldn’t.
PS. We need more Wi-Fi in NZ
I suppose the other side of the argument is that Google Docs is a free service so should we really be complaining?
Lotus Groupware works on a Mac. Might be time to look at some of their newer applications rather than expecting google to be good at something they don’t really understand.
@Mike. A document that can be edited by several people at once is a fantastic for collaboration.
We wanted to go big on this across our team internationally for doing simple 1 page editing where we might have 10 different items working at any one time. A very simple requirement.
I’m sure Google themselves do this all the time and for that very basic scenario not be handled shows a staggering lack of enterprise empathy or knowledge.
Not knowing the sort of documents you’re referring to I’ll take a stab and suggest Google Sites (or any other wiki really) - maybe a better option for the team editing of one set of “documents”.
[pops across to Google Sites to see what access control there is ... site wide access control only]
But hey, your suggestion is a cracker that would make editing Docs even more useful and I wholeheartedly support it :-)
There is also something called “SharePoint” and you could give Office Live a try “http://office.live.com/”. :-)
I don’t think that Google docs is a free service anyways. Somebody somewhere ends up paying for it (ex: Google AdWord subscribers, keep the google “free” economy humming.). I am pretty sure Google isn’t in for doing charity but lot of people assume that they do “free services”.
[...] a whole space where Google may struggle to go. With the new work collaboration tools and methods, Google is struggling to gain credibility with business users. Not only are their groupware and email applications limited in scope, they [...]
Try using zoho.com
I think it can do what you want, and personally I think it is a better application suite.
Google release folder sharing in its API some days ago. You can effectively share folders as from now on using http://folders.gdoclab.com !
Google dos is a team collaborationtool !