Recently in Google Sites 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.

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.

10692166)

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.