Google Docs Updated

This is a timely piece of news for me as my new employer extensively uses Google Docs, Google Talk, and Google Calendar in day to day operations. If you've followed this blog for any length of time you'll know that I am a big Google fan boy and this discovery was a very pleasant surprise... not to mention the fact that my Android phone integrates very nicely with these Google offerings. The news... well Google Docs has just gotten better with new collaborative tools, reminiscent of Google Wave, and speed enhancements. Here's a video compliments of the Official Google Blog:

Google docs To Be Spidered, If Published By Owner

A recent post in the Google docs help forum states "In about two weeks we will be launching a change for published docs. The change will allow published docs that are linked to from a public website to be crawled and indexed, which means they can appear in search results you see on Google.com and other search engines." This has a few users concerned about the security of their online docs to which Google says "Please note that this only applies to docs which you explicitly publish using the 'Publish as web page' or 'Publish/embed' option, and which are linked to from a publicly crawled webpage. This doesn't apply if it's only set to 'Allow anyone with the link to view (no sign-in required)'."

The following steps can ensure that your docs are safe from the spiders, if that is what you intend:

-Go to the 'Share tab'
-For documents and spreadsheets, choose 'Publish as web page'. For presentations choose 'Publish/embed'

-Click on the button that says 'Stop publishing'

This will have to be done for each document, though if you had set a document to be published then one would assume that your intent was to have people view it anyway, and having the search engines spider it's content may provide you with greater exposure to your works.

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..."

Free Office alternative

Infoworld.com has detected the addition of StarOffice to the Google Pack page, a site that Google uses to bunch together a collection of free software. StarOffice is an office productivity package developed by Sun Microsystems and is still being offered for sale at $69.95 on Sun's site, but is apparently free in the Google Pack. According to Sun the product offers "Powerful and integrated word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing, and database capabilities". The product does not support Word 2007 file formats but for the price it might be worth looking at, particularly when you compare against the competition. If you are budget minded and don't trust the online options such as Google Docs and Spreadsheets, perhaps StarOffice is your answer. Be sure to check out the Infoworld.com article.