Google Groups - The Upgrade

Google is listening to it's clients and tuning up it's collaboration tool, Google Groups, in it's push to get us all working in the cloud. With a recent roll out of improvements Google Groups has been tweaked to make sharing of calendars, sites and documents with multiple people easier. Primarily, instead of adding people one at a time, you can share your calendar, site, spreadsheet, etc., with an entire Google Group. On the other hand, when someone joins or leaves a Google Group, they automatically gain or lose editing privileges to the application. Nice!

Source: Official Google Blog

Twitter Execs Hacked - Secrets Leaked

In what I would call a severe blow to cloud computing, a major breach of Twitter executives e-mail, calendars, and documents was reported yesterday by company officials after the hacker sent documents about Twitters plans and finances, confidential contracts, and job applicants to two tech blogs, TechCrunch and Korben. The breach occurred about a month ago with a simple breach of a password providing access to an administrative employee’s e-mail account from where access was gained to the employee’s Google Apps account, where Twitter shares spreadsheets and documents with business ideas and financial details.

This must have a lot of IT managers saying I told you so!

Source: NYTimes

Google Wedding Planner?

Here is a great story about David and Bergin Boyle who used the tools available to them via Google, to plan, organize, and document their wedding day.

• Google Calendar to pick a date that worked for both of their schedules;
  
• Google Docs for documents, to do lists and list of invites, RSVPs and such;
• Google Page Creator to create a web page to inform friends and guests;
• Google Analytics to determine if anyone was using their web site;
• Google Maps to inform guest about the venue and provide suggestions about hotels and sites of interest;
• forms to allow guests to submit their ideas for songs that mean something to them;
• Gmail to communicate with guests; and
  
• Picassa to share wedding photos after the big day.

As one of the commenors on David's blog says "Maybe Google should start a site Google Wedding to have all of this in one site..."

Sync Your Outlook and Google Calendars

When I open Firefox my start page is my iGoogle page and the Google Calendar gadget sits prominently on the first tab. I like Google Calendar but I'll have to admit that keeping two calendars going and in sync with each other has caused me to nearly abandon it's use over the last few months. Alas, a solution! Google has created Google Calendar Sync, a downloadable application that allows me to enter events in either Microsoft Outlook's calendar (which I use at the office) or Google Calendar and the application will keep the two in sync with each other. There are options, you can sync either one way or two ways and with Google Calendar you can choose to make your calendar public, private, or available to a select group of users. I can see Google Calendar falling back into my favor now! This is truly a useful development, at least in my case.