Tagged with Google Docs …

Jun 08 2010
Technology

Word’s web app – pretty deficient

 

Microsoft went live with Windows Live Skydrive, the competitor to Google Docs which lets you edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint presentations. Too little, too late – a familiar comment on MS’s efforts these days. Here’s a quick look at the Word web app.

The promise is that we’ll be able to seamlessly move between viewing and editing docs with the high-powered and well-known MS Word and with a lower-powered browser version. The web app is pretty, and has a usefully familiar interface, but it is a long way behind Google.

Some of the shortcomings will be fixed, but some are non-trivial and others are showstoppers for many businesses:

  • most users are now back to 1995 in terms of losing unsaved work: docs don’t autosave, we know how bad people are at saving and, whilst Word 2003+ is pretty stable, browsers aren’t…
  • if you share an unsaved doc you lose unsaved work without even a warning
  • there’s no collaborative editing
  • it doesn’t let you edit the paragraph styles
  • the version history is very clunky
  • there are no comments, table of contents, footnotes, headers, footers, margins
  • if you upload a word file and edit online, you create a second (editable) online copy alongside the first (uneditable) online copy: confusing… really good for version out-of-control snafus
  • it doesn’t work well on all browsers

Amusingly, somewhere in the version history, my Google Docs account grabbed control and threw an error saying it couldn’t show the doc. Play nice, boys!

 

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Nov 13 2009
Technology

Microsoft Office vs Google Apps – differing strategies

A useful summary from Tim Anderson of the differing strategies of Microsoft and Google in the email/document space. If I knew the winner, I’d place my bet in the stock market… but the collaborative power of Google Apps and the functional maturity of MS Office mean that both are compelling and neither is likely to beat out the other for some years.

Microsoft is pursuing its “software plus services” strategy, which means desktop applications still play an important role. The email is Exchange-based, so you can use other email clients, but only Outlook on Windows will deliver full features. Document collaboration is based primarily on cloud storage rather then editing, though when Office Web Apps appear next year users will have some lightweight editing tools.

Google on the other hand is primarily web based, with desktop support as an add-on. Google has the lead when it comes to online document editing, since it has had Google Docs for some time, whereas Office Web Apps are still in beta. Google has no bias towards Windows and Office. With Google, a document’s primary existence is in the cloud, although you can export and import with possible loss of data or formatting.

Something else I noticed is that Google has big plans for integration with mobile devices, whereas Microsoft seems mainly concerned with Exchange synchronisation.

Microsoft’s pitch is that if you live in Windows anyway, with Exchange and SharePoint on the server, and Windows and Office on the client, then its cloud service integrates nicely. Google on the other hand is more revolutionary, not caring about what you run as long as you can connect to its services.

Although the software plus services idea has attractions, it sounds more like a transitional strategy than one for the long term. Over time, as the web platform gets more powerful, and as rich internet applications take over from pure desktop applications, the services part will grow absolutely dominant.

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Oct 13 2009
Technology

Google Docs gets shared folders

Google Docs didn’t allow shared folders – the basis of how most organisations organise their file storage. As of today, you can share a folder with others and the files in it will inherit the folder’s sharing permissions.

This removes one of the most annoying drawbacks to using Google Docs – a small but important part of how most groups work.

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Jul 21 2009
Technology

The Twitter hack – the frailty of the cloud

The details emerging from last week’s hack of Twitter’s corporate documents should worry anyone who uses web-based applications – GMail, Google Docs, Salesforce.com and so on.

TechCrunch has an in-depth account of the hack which is required reading if you’re using such services. Here’s their summary. ‘HC’ is Hacker Croll, a curious but not malicious – nor especially brilliant, worryingly – French geek:

  1. HC accessed a Twitter employee’s personal Gmail account by using the Gmail password recovery feature that sends a reset link to a secondary email address. In this case the secondary email was an expired Hotmail account so he simply registered it, ran the password recovery, picked up the Gmail email in Hotmail, clicked the link in it and reset the Gmail password. Gmail was then owned.
  2. HC then read the user’s emails in Gmail to find one confirming his registration with a new site and containing his email for that site; assuming correctly that the user used the same password for all his sites, HC now had his original Gmail password and reset it in Gmail so the user would not notice the account had changed.
  3. HC then used the same password to access the employee’s corporate Google account, getting access to a gold mine of sensitive Twitter company information from emails and, particularly, email attachments.
  4. HC then used this information along with additional password guesses and resets to take control of other Twitter employees’ personal and work emails.
  5. HC then used the same username/password combinations and password reset features to access AT&T, MobileMe, Amazon and iTunes, among other services. A security hole in iTunes gave HC access to full credit card information in clear text. HC now also had control of Twitter’s domain names at GoDaddy.
  6. Even at this point, Twitter had absolutely no idea they had been compromised.
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Jun 18 2009
2 Comments
Technology

Google Wave Preview

If you haven’t watched the Google Wave Preview – do. It’s a breathtaking re-thinking of email, instant messaging, collaborative working and much more. It should reach us later this year and will be open-source so others can build applications around it.

The developers, led by the creator of Google Maps, have broken the barriers between various forms of internet communications – email, IM, web, filesharing, etc – and solved many of the frustrations of their current implementations.

In Wave, a wave is a tree-structure of communications that can branch into sub-conversations and shift effortlessly in form between documents, email, instant messages, images and files. (No doubt Google Voice will get a look-in in due course.)

You can add and remove people from various parts of the wave, to break off into private asides or to bring in new people (who can watch a playback of the wave to help them catch up).

You can embed a wave in a blog or web page allowing many others to interact with it just as your private circle of invited contacts would do.

And all this is real-time – you see people typing (unless they turn this off), so you aren’t stuck looking at today’s ‘Fred is still learning to type’ message in an instant messenger.

It appears to outstrip the venerable MS Word ‘tracking’ feature that lets teams collaborate on documents – now you can have conversations around edits and many can work on a document at once. MS Groove tries to do this, but it’s tricky to set up and use – Wave appears natural and effortless*.

This will segue neatly into Google Docs – the developers promise to take it into Google’s spreadsheet app and further.

And i’ve watched only a third of an 80 minute show… have a look and wonder!

*Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, bizarrely responded that Wave is too complex and anti-web. Our money’s on Google doing simplicity better than Microsoft – but you have to respect Ozzie, who invented Lotus Notes and Groove.

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