Easy facilitation of collaboration is the goal of Google Docs, the free Web-based word-processor offered by Google. It serves to allow multiple users to create and edit documents while collaborating with each other in real-time. These documents (spreadsheets and presentations are also available, but not discussed here) can be created within the application itself, imported through the web interface, or received through e-mail. All documents are stored in Google’s servers, allowing the user to open them from any computer with an internet connection.
Many of the same features one might find in other popular word processing programs (spell-check, formatting, and the like) are available as part of Google Docs. The creator of any document is also given the ability to e-mail and invite additional collaborators who may then view or edit the document themselves. The document can then be downloaded to one’s desktop as Word, OpenOffice, RTF, PDF, HTML or zip, emailed out as an attachment, or published online as Web pages or postings to a blog. Limitations require that each document be 500K or smaller with only up to 2MB per embedded image. Each user can have a total of no more than 5,000 documents.
While nearly instantaneous collaboration is possible with Google Docs, our group would probably rank it no higher than a “good start” collaboration tool. While - unlike Google Chat - more than two users can communicate with each other or edit the document at the same time, this process is unfortunately hindered by the fact that with three or more it is difficult to see who is saying what unless that individual identifies themselves through the text or pre-agreed upon font/color/ /size/etc. When a question arises regarding any particular insertion or deletion, unless you are collaborating with only one other person, the change is not easily addressed.
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While as a communication tool we found Google Docs to be a bit frustrating, as a collaboration tool, it’s a bit less so. However, Google does make one scratch their head in regards to what they do and do not include or allow. For example, when creating a spreadsheet, collaborators are given the ability to “chat” with each other in a sidebar of sorts. When working within the context of a document, however, all “chatting” must be done within the document itself, causing some confusion between the content and discussion. Additionally, unless new entries are physically altered by the user that created them, it is near impossible to tell at a glance what has been edited/changed. It does make up for itself a little bit in its highly aggressive system of automatic saves and copious retrieval opportunities.
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Google Docs interface itself will be familiar to those with any word processing history, albeit with less tabs than you’d find elsewhere. This can be seen as both good and bad, as the less clutter – the easier to decipher, but perhaps with a loss of features. This can be rectified of course if Google Docs is used solely for online collaboration, and then exported into one of the other formats listed above for future modification.
2 comments:
It's mentioned here, but I think bears added emphasis that one of the things Google has done right here is not cluttering up the interface with the 80% of the tools that most people don't use very often. Through user research, they've slowly added a few items here and there that people are demanding, but they've intentionally kept it simple. I think we'll see this as a trend as more and more desktop application developers start migrating to a web-based platform.
I also wanted to add a point of clarification. While we collaborated on the document, it was hard to distinguish in real-time as we added to/edited the document, as was mentioned here. However, Google Docs also preserves revisions of the document that identified which changes are made by which contributors (much like Word's "Track Changes" feature). In other words, any of the authors can click on the "Revisions" tab at the top of the document and see a list of versions of the document organized chronologically. From here, the author/editor can check the box on two different versions and choose to "Compare Documents." Google Docs then displays the two documents intertwined with each version represented by a different color. To be sure, there is a slight learning curve to reading the compared documents.
I think it would have been interesting to use a Google Doc as a rough draft as we did our write up. We would have ended up with a single document that encompasses all of our experiences while also using that application as it was intended. It was hard to get a feel for how it works when we were trying to use it for communication in real time. Using it simply as a shared document would have given us more of a flavor for it.
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