Sm. Business & Technology

In our office we use a combination of services, paid and free. Google Docs (free) is one of those solutions. I have been “testing” this for a few years now and honestly it keeps getting better and better. There are several downfalls though and I will cover them here.

Our companies day to day document use needs to be as robust as possible while being fully accessible from virtually anywhere. Because of this I have attempted to use a wide range of solutions to make this possible. One of those solutions happens to be Google Apps. I am also currently in a beta test for Microsoft Office 365. There is a multitude of solutions available for “Office Documents” and group editing/sharing of those documents. I immediately have to discard anything that is not simple and user friendly.

We deal with a wide range of individuals and companies so some standards have to be met. Microsoft Office is one of those standards. To be honest though it is in my opinion that Microsoft Office is the best document creation software on the market at this time. I realize that there are other solutions like Open Office, Google Docs or Zoho Office. The majority of people we deal with use Microsoft Office though. I would love to move away from Microsoft Office and take the plunge right into Google Docs but they still fall short in quite a few areas. Have you ever created a highly customized/formatted document in Word and then opened it in Google Docs? Yeah it sucks, the majority of the formatting is lost.

I have tried all the solutions mentioned along with several others for our day to day use. We prefer Microsoft Office, again for document creation and editing. Now on the side of storage and sharing Microsoft falls a little flat. Other services like Drop Box or Box.net allow for sharing but the pricing is not where I believe it should be. This is where Google Apps (the Docs side specifically) is starting to become my favorite solution. With Google’s addition of Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office it has become a little sweeter. Cloud Connect allows you to handle things like collaborative editing, revision history and sharing along with a few other features. For me though the first three are the most important.

I still think that Google is missing the mark a bit though. I would much rather be able to have a folder like DropBox where my files live, rather than having to pull down specific documents to work on. Also when creating a new document when Google Cloud Connect saves and syncs I have no control over what folder it is going to be in. Google just dumps it right into my “Home” location. I then have to login and organize from there. The other major issue is that it will only sync Microsoft Office docs and store the revision history. I also work with Illustrator, Photoshop and several other random programs.

So what would be a better solution for me? Being able to have a synced folder on my desktop that auto syncs all the files in it with the organized structure I have in place. Being able to open those files with their default applications and when saved having it auto update the revision of that file, and to be able to store unlimited revisions of that file. I know that with DropBox, Box.net or even JungleDisk you can do this kind of stuff, to an extent that is. Also as I mentioned before, these solutions start to get pricey, especially for a small-mid sized office. There is a new kid on the block though that may become my ideal solution. I recently downloaded GDocsDrive and I can say I am impressed and excited with the direction the project is going. It too though has some shortfalls… for now… I have made a few feature requests to the developers and have had some response on those items. That will be the topic of my next post.