Tag Archive for: Google Docs

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Friday Thought: Google Drive – Yield Before Your Leap

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Google (finally) announced and began releasing Google Drive.  For those not in the know, Google Drive is cloud storage available as a stand-alone service or as a component of Google Apps.  The stand-alone version included 5GB of storage for free with affordable plans for more space — a direct competitive threat to services like Dropbox and Box.  Both versions include sync clients for PCs, MACs, and iPhone/iPad that give you standard desktop/folder access to your data in the cloud.

Google Drive for Business

Google Drive for Business is a new component to Google Apps for Business that will roll out to customers over the next several weeks.  While the business version shares the device sync tool with the consumer version, it offers much more to the business customer:

  • Control over which users can use the service and which users can download and use the sync clients.
  • Control over which, if any, users can purchase additional storage independently
  • The ability to centrally purchase storage and allocate storage to users as needed

Benefits

  • You can now more easily use and integrate Google Docs as your file service; users can more easily collaborate and share information.
  • Users can work locally using their current desktop applications and files will be saved and shared in their Google Docs folders.
  • Users can have secure access to files from computers, tablets, and smart phones without the overhead of a VPN service.
  • Storage for uploaded or sync’d files in “native” formats has increased to 5 GB per user.

Challenges

  • Unlike an on-premise file server, Google Drive does not lock open files.  While you have version tracking, if two individuals are locally editing the same file, the most recent copy to sync will be the current version.
  • Users may quickly fill up their 5GB of space; additional storage is affordable.
  • Because sharing is easy, businesses should have policies and processes in place to oversee and manage permissions.

Deployment Strategy

In our experience, your Google Drive deployment strategy will focus on how you decide to manage your storage.  While nice, 5 GB per user will not be sufficient for most businesses, particularly since the space is user-specific.  Adding space is affordable, and will be necessary.

When you add space to Google Docs and Drives, you are actually subscribing to the additional space on a per user basis.  Licenses range in size from 20 GB to 16 TB at a monthly cost of $0.10 per GB or less (with no bandwidth and get/put charges).  While this strategy works, it will require monitoring space usage on a per user basis.

Another approach is to add a user account to serve as your file service.  In doing so, you purchase additional storage only for this “user” and configure the space along the lines of a traditional file server.  You have the freedom to create and share your top level folders and folder trees, and users will be able to see the file service as “Shared with Me”.  Users can then move folders to “My Drive” if they want the information available locally on their PC or Mac.

A central storage strategy also enables additional storage management options.  Tools like CloudLock Vault — a tool to monitor permissions and create tamper-proof and protected folders — run best when the space is owned by a generic file service administration account.

Alternatives

Almost always, there is more than one option.  As an alternative to Google Drive, tools like SyncDocs provide the ability to sync Google Docs (with or without extra storage) to a local file structure.  In some ways, SyncDocs offers a better user experience.  SyncDocs has more options with respect to folder location, the ability to select which Google Doc folders to sync locally, and the ability to specify conversion preferences.

When looking at Google Drive and its alternatives, we recommend walking through a few use cases to see which piece of software best meets your needs.

Conclusion

Google Drive, combined with Google Docs and additional space, provides Google Apps users with more opportunity to simplify file services.  Moving file services to the cloud is a logical next step for many businesses, as it can further reduce and simplify your IT footprint well beyond replacing a file server.  The need for VPN and expensive remote access servers can be greatly reduced or eliminated.

If you want to learn more or join us for a demo, please let us know.

 

Tuesday Take-Away: Style Management in Google Docs

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Those who know me recognize that my evangelistic zealousness for cloud computing is always tempered with a healthy dose of pragmatism.  I see the benefits, the efficiency, and the value of cloud computing and Google Apps well beyond the basic savings.   And yet, even I have not fully migrated off MS Office for some of my productivity needs.

Why?  I am a “moderate power user” of MS Office.  I rely on preset and custom styles to make formatting documents easier.  And until now, styles have been lacking in Google Docs. This is not a huge problem, I just never liked the size, font, and spacing selection of the standard Heading styles in Google Docs.

Fortunately, change is here.

In Google Docs, you can now change the default styles to meet your preferences.  To do so is simple.  First, set up the text they way you want it to look — font, size, attributes, line spacing, alignment, et cetera.  Next, pull down the style menu, click on the arrow next to the style you want to define, and select “Update to Match Selection.”  Voila!  You have a style.

There are a few limitations.  Most notably, your styles are saved for the document only and not as a default template.   You can, however, create a document as a style sheet, make it ‘read only’ and make a copy when you need a blank document with your style preferences.

As responsiveness to customer feedback and constant innovation lead to new features and capabilities in Google Apps, the case for Google Apps grows stronger.  Click here to learn more about the benefits.


Google Docs and OffiSync Back on Track

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Many of our OffiSync customers experienced authentication issues over the past several days when connecting to Google Docs.

These errors were due to changes made by Google in the Google Docs API.  OffiSync has released a new version that fixes the issue.

The new version should install automatically the next time users open an MS Office application.  If users do not see the prompt, they should click on Settings -> Check for Updates on the OffiSync menu/toolbar/ribbon.

 

 

Tuesday Take-Away: Google Apps as a SEO Tool

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Search engine optimization (“SEO”) experts will tell you that to improve your “organic”, or unpaid, standing in search results, search engines need to see you web site as relevant.  A major factor for nearly all search engines is how many authoritative sites link to your web site and the amount of authoritative content is available at your site.

Enter Google Apps for Business

As you may or may not know, within Google Apps for Business, you have the ability share information publicly.  When you do this, you are instructing Google to index the information in the global search engine.  You are giving Google authoritative information.

Taking advantage of this feature can improve your SEO results.

Calendar Events:

If you have public events (webinars, seminars, speaking engagements, etc.), create a company events calendar in Google Apps for Business and create a calendar entry for each event.  You can also embed the calendar in your web site.

For each calendar entry, include links to relevant information on your web site such as data sheets or a more detailed description of the event.

Be sure to mark the event “Public” so that the event is indexed by Google.

Documents:

Many web sites include documents — data sheets, white papers, etc. — in PDF format that visitors can download.

Instead of uploading these to your web server, save these in Google Docs and make them public.  Doing so pushes them into the Google search engine for indexing.

Within these documents, include live HTML links back to related content on you web site.  These can be to a product page, a contact us form, and your home page (of course).  Granted, individual that print the PDF files will not benefit from the links.  But those that view them on-screen, and the search engines, can follow those links to your site.

With URL mapping, your content appears to be under your domain and part of your website (i.e. docs.yourdomain.com),  In reality, the content is actually external to you web site.  Links from public information in Google Docs and Calendar provide are authoritative and will be indexed.

Friday Thought: All Outages are Not Equal

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Last week Google Docs experienced an outage lasting about 30 minutes.  Almost immediately, the “reconsider the cloud” articles and blogs began to appear.   Articles like this one on Ars Technica, immediately lump the Google Docs outage with other cloud outages, including Amazon’s outage earlier this year and the on-going problems with Microsoft’s BPOS and Office365 services.

And well no outages are good, they are not all the same.  In most cases, the nature of the outages and their impact reflect the nature of the architecture and the service provider.

  • The Google Docs outage was caused by a memory error and was exposed by an update.  Google acknowledged the error and resolved the issue in under 45 minutes.
  • Amazon’s outage was a network failure that took an entire data center off-line.  Customer that signed up for redundancy were not impacted.
  • Microsoft’s flurry of outages, including a 6 hour outage that took Microsoft almost 90 minutes to fully acknowledge, appear to be related to DNS, load, and other operational issues.

Why is it important to understand the cause and nature of the outage?  With this understanding, you can provide rational comparisons between cloud and in-house systems and between vendors.

Every piece of software has bugs and some bugs are more serious than others.  Google’s architecture enables Google to roll forward and roll back changes rapidly across their entire infrastructure.  The fact that a problem was identified and corrected in under an hour is evidence of the effectiveness of their operations and architecture.

To compare Google to in-house systems, Microsoft releases bug fixes and updates monthly which generally require server reboots.  Depending on the size and use of each server (file/print, Exchange, etc), multiple reboots may be necessary and reboots can run well over an hour.  In the last two years, over 50% of all “patch Tuesday” releases have been followed up with updates, emergency patches, or hot-fixes with the recommendation of immediate action.  Fixing a bug in one of Microsoft’s releases can take from hours to days.  Comparatively, under an hour is not so shabby.

When looking across cloud vendors, the nature of the outage is also important.  Amazon customers that chose not to pay extra for redundancy knowingly assumed a small risk that their systems could become unavailable due to a large error or event.  Just like any IT decision, each business must make a cost/benefit analysis.

Customers should understand the level of redundancy provided with their service and the extra costs involved to ensure better availability.

The most troubling of the cloud outages are Microsoft’s.  Why?  Because the causes appear to relate to an inability to manage a high-volume, multi-tenant infrastructure.  Just like you cannot watch TV without electricity, you cannot run online services (or much of anything on a computer) without DNS.  That Microsoft continues to struggle with DNS, routing, and other operational issues leads me to believe that their infrastructure lacks the architecture and operating procedures to prove reliable.

Should cloud outages make us wary? Yes and no.  Yes to the extent that customers should understand what they are buying with a cloud solution — not just features and functions, but ecosystem.  No, to the extent that when put in perspective, cloud solutions are still generally proving more reliable and available than in-house systems.

 

 

New Feature Thursday: Discussions in Google Docs

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Looking beyond basic comments within documents, Google Docs now features the ability to use comments for discussions with email integration.  Key aspects of this new feature include:

  • The ability to reply to comments written by others
  • Identity and ownership of all comments
  • The ability to resolve comments and discussions instead of deleting them.  You can review all discussions at any time.
  • Add somebody to a discussion thread using @mentions.  They get an email with your comment and a link so they can join in. Or, the individual can simply reply to the email
  • The ability to manage if and when you receive notifications for comments and discussions

Given the scope of the change, Discussions are only available for new documents.

For more information and a cool demo video, click here.

If you think this type of collaboration can help your business run more efficiently, please let us know.

Is Cloud Connect Enough?

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Let’s face it.  While Google Docs offers decent web-based office productivity tools, you and some of your users need or want to keep the interface and features of MS Office.  The good news is that you can integrate MS Office and Google Docs to create a collaborative file service.  Google Cloud Connect, a free utility with Google Apps, is one such integration tool.  But, is it enough?

In our assessment, Cloud Connect provides basic integration, but lacks features that will give your users the full power of Google Docs as a collaboration platform.  Here is what we find lacking:

  • Automation Overdrive:  On installation, all MS Office documents will be added to Google Docs with automatic synchronization.  It is too easy to end up synchronizing files that you do not want or need to be in the cloud.
  • No Format Options:  Cloud Connect always uploads files in native MS Office formats, utilizing valuable space.  Users do not have the option to convert to Google Docs’ formats to take advantage of the unlimited storage.
  • No Collections:  All files are synchronized to your Home folder; you don’t have the option of selecting other locations.
  • Limited Permissions:   Documents inherit the rights of the Home collection, and you can add/change collaborators individually to files.  Since you cannot save files to other collections, you cannot take advantage of the permissions capabilities of Google Docs.
  • Site-Less:  You cannot synchronize files to Google Sites, so you do not have the ability to use all available storage and you cannot take advantage of the version control features in Sites.

Fortunately, you have some options.   Our favorite is OffiSync Premium.  In addition to providing all of the features lacking on Cloud Connect, OffiSync Premium lets you add/remove Google Docs collections and Google Site pages, email collaborators, and embed image and web search results … all from within a toolbar/ribbon in MS Word, Excel, or Powerpoint.  Also, OffiSync Premium gives you co-authoring collaboration across versions of MS Office, including 2003, 2007, and 2010.