Recently in Google Docs Category

More than a few institutions of higher learning (including California State University Northridge, I've learned) are in the process of transitioning from traditional e-mail services (generally Web-delivered, I believe) to Google Apps, through which students and faculty will have e-mail and documents managed by Google (thus either freeing university IT staff to "work on other things," which could mean "other things," or "you're fired"; unsure on that one).

Anyhow, it's no secret that I'm a proponent and occasional user of Google Apps (more Sites, some Docs and Mail), and the city of Los Angeles' exploration of Apps for its use has put the spotlight even more tightly on Google and its response to and resolution of problems.

So Brown University is among the schools moving to Google Apps, and recently some students discovered that through Gmail they were able to read hundreds of messages in other students' e-mail boxes.

Not terribly secure. It turns out that 22 students were able to read others' e-mail, but there has been some criticism aimed at Google for a) taking 3 days to resolve the problem and b) not communicating well (or pretty much at all) with the university's IT department after the problem was discovered.

"It was a small hiccup along the way and it's an issue we've taken extremely seriously," Google's Rajan Sheth told The New York Times. (And you know when The New York Times gets involved, there's considerable heat on your ass).

What I'll say is that these things happen, and Google should be getting better at having them not happen. I don't know how they're doing on that. I suspect we'll either hear more (especially if things don't go well at CSUN) or hear less (if things do go well).

And as I, along with scores of others, have written recently, Microsoft's own cloud-based apps are starting to roll out, although it'll be awhile before they work at all (the Word component is still read-only) and probably a longer while before they are as well integrated with each other and with a matching e-mail component, and also a long time (or even never) before documents are as easily shared and collaborated on as they are in Google Apps.

You never know, especially at this early stage. One thing I do hope is that a) Google learns from all these glitches and smooths out these transitions, and b) the competition from Microsoft pushes Google to upgrade Apps that much more quickly and start adding the missing functionality (like easily created paragraph indents and "smart" quotes) that would make using Docs more like a true MS Word-type application and less like a souped-up, HTML- and CSS-powered text editor.

That's a long title, eh? I suppose I should tighten up on it, but in the wild-west world of blogging, it's writer's choice, am I right?

Anyhow, the two big topics these days are the new apps.gov site which helps government agencies choose cloud-based applications, and Microsoft's unveiling of an early version of its Office Web suite, which brings longtime cash-generator MS Office into the cloud and accessible via a Web browser near you.

So if the federal government is recommending cloud-based applications, and Microsoft is making cloud-based apps, if only to compete with Google Apps (which is eating Microsoft's lunch and eyeing its breakfast and dinner, too), then apps and data in the cloud are starting to look a whole lot more mainstream.

And the city of Los Angeles' interest in adopting Google Apps isn't looking so out there.

I give Microsoft a whole lot of grief in this blog, and it's pretty obvious that the company has been reacting (instead of acting or innovating) since its founding. How can you argue with it? It's probably one of the most successful companies in American history.

And in this case, the development of Office Web is a reaction to the innovation of Google and others in developing browser-based applications.

Still, Microsoft is Microsoft, and Office is Office, and if you're a big entity like the City of Los Angeles, I encourage you to test out all the alternatives, including Google Apps, Microsoft Office Web, Zoho and anything else I've either forgotten to mention or haven't ever heard of.

Many of my fellow users of free, open-source software think cloud computing is going to take away our freedom, hurt open-source innovation and compromise our data. I don't know whether all, some or none of these things will happen.

What I do know is that in the near future, data and apps in the cloud is going to happen, government and the enterprise is already going there, and millions of others will soon follow.

And I believe that there's a place in this paradigm for huge makers of proprietary software, huge Web-based companies, plus companies and developers of software both free/open and otherwise to create new ways of creating, accessing, storing and manipulating the data that we derive from our personal and professional lives.

This image appears in the Google Chrome browser when you try to load a Web page and something goes wrong. It has nothing to do with today's Gmail outage, but it did come up when I (appropriately) Googled "sad Google," so I present it to you in this entry ...

In case you hadn't noticed (and if so, I don't know how you managed it), Gmail is dead today.

More than a few people I work with have their various e-mail accounts feeding into Gmail, where they usually read their collected messages in Google's Gmail-reffic skin from wherever they happen to be.

Just not today.

According to the post above from Cnet's DeepTech blog, other Google services, including search, Google Docs, Sites, Calendar and a host of other Googly bits are functioning as normal (i.e. they're working).

This is one of those things that doesn't look good for those advocating the adoption of Google's Gmail and other services under the Google Apps umbrella in the enterprise, including the City of Los Angeles.

We'll see how Google pulls out of this, and how it affects the uptime stats for the Gmail service. And it'd be nice to find out exactly what happened.

One thing's true: It's a pain in the ass to lose access to your e-mail in the middle of the day.

It makes me feel pretty good at this particular moment about POP-ing my mail into Mozilla's Thunderbird ... and keeping my Yahoo Mail account going.

The Daily News has been in the thick of the fight over whether Google Apps — principally Gmail and Google Docs — should be adopted by the City of Los Angeles to replace current systems that are aging and said to be much less than reliable.

Much of the battle is over whether a Web-accessed system for e-mail and document creation (and collaboration) will be as secure as systems with traditional servers. Detractors worry about information being compromised, but others say that Google has a lot more on the ball security- and redundancy-wise than the systems currently in place.

In the past few days, a couple op-eds have run in the paper:

• "Google on Google' Gmail: Why it's good for city hall" by Dave Girouard (president of enterprise for Google)
• "Can Google really protect and serve Los Angeles?" by By Paul M. Weber (president of the Los Angeles Police Protective League)

• Google Apps can work for L.A. Just mind the passwords

I've written about Gmail and Google Docs quite a bit in the past, and regarding their use by entities such as the city of Los Angeles, I'll try to state my opinion a bit more quickly than usual. I'll bullet-point it:

• Lots of organizations are farming out their e-mail to Gmail. Google does a great job with this app. It's different enough in many useful ways from other e-mail clients, both on- and offline, to stand out of the pack. The ability to "tag" messages seems so simple yet borders on revolutionary.
• Google Docs isn't as sophisticated as Microsoft Office. Google Docs does work, and if you're willing to think outside the document-creating box for your text documents, spreadsheets and presentations, it probably handles 95 percent of the needs of 95 percent of the people 95 percent of the time. For "specialty" uses, the city can still install traditional client software such as Microsoft Office or the free OpenOffice. The great thing about Google Docs is that it makes collaboration on and sharing of documents an integral and seamless part of their creation and modification. For an organization like the city, this is a huge thing. Still, I hope the city is prepared to hire a development team to "build out" Google Docs with the many specialized templates that will be needed to make this system work.
• Having Google hold onto the data of the city means much less software and hardware needs to be purchased, maintained and managed.
• This is pretty much the future: cloud-based storage (with top-grade archiving and backup) and network-delivered applications. The city might as well go there now.

As an experiment, I decided to bring my Evolutionary Computing presentation on making the journey into free, open-source software — a slide show originally created in OpenOffice Impress 2.4 — into Google Docs, which happens to have a presentation app in addition to the better-known Docs and Spreadsheets components.

I revised the presentation — taking some things out, adding others and providing some updates on what I'm doing — and output it as a PDF.

Download that PDF for your reading pleasure by clicking on the image above or the link below:

Evolutionary Computing (revised July 2009)

Interesting note: I believe that no previous entry on this blog has been filed under so many categories. (And I've been considering dumping Categories entirely and just using tags ...)

It's the announcement we've all be waiting for, one that Google at one point in the past said it wouldn't make.

But it did:

Google will release its own PC operating system, Chrome OS, to leverage the company's Web-based Google Apps and bypass Microsoft's Windows operating system entirely on not just netbooks but every PC platform from the smallest ARM ultraportable to a full Intel-based desktop.

(See CNet's Webware post on the announcement)

In a very-much related move, Google made the symbolic move of removing the "beta" tag from its core Web-based apps for Mail, Docs, Calendar and Talk. Not that anything has changed about those apps in the past day or so, but according to ZDnet, the move from "beta" to what can only be assumed is production-ready status, whether real, imagined or long overdue, makes those applications attractive to the corporate/enterprise customers Google hopes to attract to Google Apps and now the Google Chrome OS.

And while the Google Chrome OS will be based on the Linux kernel, it could very well end what little preloading of other Linux-based OSes is left in the netbook space. Nobody outside of the fanboy contingent knows what Ubuntu (or any other current Linux distribution) is, and that doesn't seem likely to change, my 1,000+ blog posts on the subject notwithstanding.

So I'm working on a not-so-complicated (but not plain text) document that began its life some time ago in Microsoft Word, which means it's a .doc file that got uploaded to Google Docs.

It sort of, kind of looked OK in Google Docs, except that in a few places I couldn't get the fonts and the margins right.

And outputting the Google Docs document back into .doc or .odt (OpenDocument) was a real mess, with a mix of Web styles, Word styles, strange margins, etc.

After getting nowhere fast in Google Docs, I finally tried to remove all formatting and start over. But I couldn't even get the line spacing right.

I'm sure a little CSS hackery could have made things right, but I'm not in any mode to do that.

So I exported the document in .odt format and worked on it in OpenOffice Writer. Now I can save it as an HTML, MS Word or RTF document, or better yet export it as a PDF.

I love having Google Docs enable me to work on things anywhere, at any time, but I've found that the cloud-based app works best when documents originate in Google Docs and stay there. Converting them to .odt, RTF and .doc format causes the formatting to break down.

I've blogged in the past about how poorly Google Docs offline with Gears worked for me.

So at this point, what would work better for my situation would be cloud-based files accessed by apps on my local client.

And I'd like to see the ability to access networked files in the cloud be available from every application, meaning the feature would be integrated in the operating system or desktop environment and not be part of a single application.

Just a thought. I'll feel better about Google Docs later this week when I get back to what I mostly use it for. I'm dropping code and documentation into it all the time and sharing those files with my co-workers. That's one thing that Google Docs does better than anything else I've seen.

And I will try to create a heavily formatted document in Docs. I just wish it could be the SAME document shared between Docs and OpenOffice. Maybe a Docs-formatted document would play more nicely in OO than a Word-formatted document turned into a Docs document, then an OO document.

I've been getting deep into Google's many services, and today is no exception. First I discovered a bunch of features in Gmail (Web version, print version) that are turning out to be really helpful.

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I'm using the Google Chrome browser again on my XP box today, since I'm working on our Google fire map and feeding it data from a Google Spreadsheet.

I'm also going to be looking into creating a private Web page for company use at Google Sites, which is targeted as an easy-to-use alternative to corporate Intranets. It's also a place where you can set up a site just for your family, friends or whoever. If you wish, you can control who gets access to the pages, a feature I will be tapping for this project.

Back to Google Chrome. It's still incredibly fast, and I can't wait until it's ported to OS X and Linux. As I've said, it doesn't have quite the feature set of, say, Firefox, but for the most part I don't need any of those features and will easily give them up for increased speed on the 99.9 percent of stuff that Chrome does so well.

I haven't made a secret of the fact that I've never really delved into Google's Gmail, even though I automatically have an account due to my much heavier use of Google Docs and previous use of Google Groups.

All that changed in recent weeks due to my ISP DSL Extreme's decision to transfer all of its mail accounts from its own servers to Gmail.

I mainly use my DSL Extreme e-mail address for mailing lists. I have my OpenBSD and Debian mailing list traffic — which can be considerable — on that e-mail address just to keep it separate from the rest of my mail.

I never did like the DSL Extreme Web mail interface, and the fact that it's going away in a week doesn't bother me one bit.

But since DSL Extreme allowed users appropriately extreme flexibility in handling their mail, I've used it consistently, just not in a Web interface.

Instead I've used external mail clients — particularly Thunderbird in Windows — to process the mail, accessing it via IMAP and filtering it into folders that live on the server.

Since the connection to the mail servers can be fully encrypted and of the IMAP or POP variety, I've used my account fairly regularly.

My "lifestyle," whatever that means, makes IMAP work way better for me than POP, which downloads mail to a single computer, and since I'm in front of a half-dozen different computers in different places, POP doesn't work for me at all.

I was worried that the transition to Gmail for my DSL Extreme account would mean that POP and IMAP access would be gone, and I would be limited to the unfamiliar Gmail Web interface only.

But that is not the case. I can read the mail via POP or IMAP with any mail client software, and now I have a lot more space — about 7 GB, even though I can't ever see needing that much.

And I've discovered a few rudimentary things about the Gmail interface that just might have me using it more and more — and dumping traditional mail clients entirely.

Right now, the reason is organization. I've relied on the folders and filters of Thunderbird to bring some semblance of order to the heavy volume of mailing-list traffic I receive.

I'm limited only by the folders themselves. A message can only be in a single folder at a time, and that makes finding things difficult in some instances.

But Gmail uses labels instead of folders, and an individual e-mail message can have as many or as few labels as I wish. So I can, for instance have a message from the debian-user mailing list begin its life with the labels INBOX and Debian. I can delete it if I don't need it, and that's what happens most of the time. But if I want to save that e-mail, I can remove the INBOX and Debian labels and effectively archive the conversation by giving it a Debian Saved label.

The other way Gmail helps me with mailing-list messages in specific, and the rest of my e-mail in general, is by grouping messages that are replies to each other together when I read one of the messages in that particular group. I think this is what Gmail refers to as "conversations," but again, I'm so new at this that I'm unsure of the terminology.

What I am sure of is that this labeling and grouping, which at first looks more than a bit forbidding, is in fact quite useful.

Another thing Google does with Gmail is bring together all of the Google services I use (and many I don't but just might try).

I'm already using the Google Chrome browser to access Gmail, and when I click a link called Sites, I have the option to create secure Web pages, gather information on them and control who has access to them. In short, it's a great, free tool for collaboration over the Web. In that way, it's a valuable extension to Google Docs (also easily navigable to from the Gmail interface), which is already performing very well as a collaborative tool used by many of us at the Daily News.

I'm trying to use Google Docs to bring some kind of order to my own documents. I'll have to get back to you on that one. I finally do have offline access to Docs (via the Google Gears API), and I'm less than impressed with its reliability and speed on my Gateway 1.3 GHz/1 GB RAM laptop. Gears and offline Docs are both still relatively young, so there's plenty of room for improvement.

One more thing: Chat.

Since I've been guesting in the Op-Ed department for the past week and a couple days, I'm not on my own PC, and as a result all my usual apps, from Pidgin to Thunderbird to Notepad++ and Filezilla are not installed.

I did add Google Chrome after Firefox 2 started acting up on me. And on this PC, Internet Explorer 7 has actually been less of a dog than I remember. I did get the installer for FF 3, but I've yet to do the install.

I said I was going to get to chat ... and I am.

Since I didn't have Pidgin, which I use to bring my Yahoo!, AOL/AIM and Google chat accounts under one app, I switched from the "Classic" Yahoo Mail Web interface to the "All-New" version of Yahoo Mail, which is designed to look and act like a traditional local mail client, with drag-and-drop capability.

The reason I haven't been using the "new" interface until now is that its relatively large graphical load doesn't play well with some of my, ahem, older hardware, and the speed of the "old" Yahoo Mail is very much needed on those creaky laptops and desktops.

To make a long story somewhat shorter, I opted for the "new" Yahoo Mail so I could use the integrated Yahoo Messengher client. When you want to chat with one of your Yahoo contacts, all you do is click on their name, and a chat window opens in your mail interface. That way, you can use Yahoo Messenger without needing to have the application installed on your computer.

Now I'm bringing things around to my point, which is Google. Google's chat service — Google Talk — has a "gadget" that mimics a standalone IM applications but can be used on any PC with a compatible Web browser. That way you can use Google Talk from just about any Web-connected PC without worrying about individual clients or Pidgin.

I only have one person who I use Google Talk to IM, so I'm probably better off using Pidgin if I can, but it's nice to see so much innovation in chat from Google and Yahoo. For all I know, AIM has the same capability, but since I've probably checked my AOL mail ... maybe once or twice ... since I first signed up for AIM a few years ago, I know nothing about it. I also remember AOL Mail as offering IMAP and POP to its users, and for that reason alone it might be well worth investigating as a mail solution.

Note: I remember hearing that Google was "rolling out" IMAP access to Gmail users and not granting it to all at once. Since my DSL Extreme account is not part of the regular Gmail throng, I appear to have both IMAP and POP as part of the deal between DSL Extreme and Google.

Summing up: A bit long and rambly, don't you think? I'm just trying to think out loud about how deep I'm getting into the world of Google and its services.

There's been a loud, long argument in the free, open-source software community (and at LXer in particular) about what cloud computing means for open-source software, users, freedom and all of that. For me, the freedom to have my files live in the cloud and be accessed from anywhere I'm networked is trumping almost everything else.

I'd love for the Google Docs interface to get more sophisticated about things like indented paragraphs and smart quotes — two of my typographical pet peeves. The technology is there, since Docs is based on HTML and CSS and can do anything that those two sophisticated technologies allow (and that is quite a lot).

And as I've said more than a few times recently, having the option of working with my cloud-based files either through Web interfaces or via the same kinds of locally based applications we all use today is something I'm very interested in seeing happen. It's kind of ironic that the company I see buying into this concept (although their plans and offerings are presented in such a cryptic way that I can never really tell just what they're planning) is Microsoft.

Yes, Microsoft's dependence on traditional apps like MS Office and the billions it brings them has profoundly affected the company's strategy for cloud-based data and apps. At the end of the day, a melding of local client apps that are not necessarily Web browsers could very well be more efficient than doing everything through the browser. (Or not; it's too early to tell at this point).

The more data we have, from text files to images, audio and video, is increasingly hard to get a handle on. We need help storing, backing up, categorizing and utilizing all of this data. In my mind, it all points to the cloud.

Depending on how you look at it, it's a little "Matrix"-y, "HAL 9000"-ish, "Neuromancer"-like

All I know is that Sun's "The Network Is the Computer" mantra is becoming more true every day. Some of that will be good, some not. And that goodness/other will differ from person to person, application to application and entity to entity.

We won't be limited to the huge cloud providers. There will still be traditional servers everywhere, along with clients in more shapes, sizes and guises than you could imagine. And the lone-PC-in-the-wilderness won't go away, just as paper itself has survived in this most computer-infused of ages.

But the cloud model is real. And it's growing.

Companies that understand this will prosper, others not so much.

OpenOffice Writer starts in about five seconds in Debian Lenny on my Gateway Solo 1450, and I have to think the preload app is responsible.

I've written before about how preload doesn't seem to have any effect on Iceweasel and Epiphany, which I'd sure like to start more quickly, but with OpenOffice, preload seems to be doing its job.

While on the topic of Open Office, I should mention that I've been using it quite a bit lately. I like the way the fonts look way better than those in Abiword, and OO just seems to be working well, so I've taken to it quite a bit more than in previous months.

Oh, and Google Docs offline under Google Gears has been pretty much a big disappointment.

Since I started using it (with Firefox in Ubuntu), it has lost my database once, and is dog-slow the rest of the time. I hate starting Docs offline in the browser and waiting an age for my files to show up. With this kind of performance — which is in much contrast to Google Docs' swiftness when connected to the Internet, I'd much rather use a traditional word processor or text editor.

Hence my increasing use of OpenOffice.