Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Come on everyone let's share

I was checking out Google Apps, like I do almost every day, and I happened to find a spiffy new look to the place. It has finally started looking a bit more professional, rather than as if the interface was designed by elementary schoolers. Do have to say I liked the old look too, but Google does need to attract a slightly older crowd. 

Turns out the Google Docs has now allowed the ability to share folders. If you put any doc in a folder it automatically becomes shared with everyone that has rights to the folder.  Everything works like a breeze for sharing with individual users.  

To make Google Apps enterprise/production ready it needs to focus in on groups.  Rather than having to add each user individually a creator should just have to add the correct group from the domain and everything should work as if all users were added individually. 

Sadly, this is not what I have observed.  Even sharing just single docs within Google Docs does not work correctly.  I share a document with a group, that is defined within the admin console, if I do not send an invitation with a link all members within the group will never see my shared document.  A document will only show up inside docs if the user clicks on the link inside the invitation. 

I understand for reasons against having the document be auto populated within Google Docs if it is shared with a group.  If it is used in a enterprise people might go sharing crazy.  Then you would never be able to find anything.  Personally, I think there should be a setting that allows documents to be auto populated or not.

The same problem comes with sharing folders.  Not the items within folders, but the folders themselves.  I do not know if this is intentional, but I find it to be a flaw.  Google hear my cries, I love Docs but fix the group sharing or it won't be enterprise/production worthy!

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