[tlug] Google Apps for Work

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Curt Sampson writes:
 > On 2016-05-06 17:47 +0900 (Fri), Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
 > 
 > > ...(and Google Docs, which does its best to
 > > convince you that it's Office...).
 > 
 > I'm pretty familiar with Google Apps for Work (which includes Docs,
 > Sheets, Slides, Draw, and maybe a couple of other things depending on
 > how you look at it).
 > 
 > I don't find it tries to convince you

Obviously I didn't mean values of "you" including *you*. :-)
(Exaggeration for effect, and all that.)

 > However, 95% (or more, probably) of the situations where someone
 > uses Word/Excel/whatever use the 10% of the Office features that
 > Google provides in their apps,

Which is what I meant, but if I'd written that, there'd be no thread. ;-)

On to real business:

 > The true brilliance of the Google apps, though, is one most people
 > don't appreciate: much, much better collaboration than stand-alone
 > apps running on PCs. That you don't make copies to give to people
 > is a huge, huge feature, though it seems that most people don't
 > understand that.

Do "most people" need to understand that?  I mean, if you don't trim
your email, who cares about the copies of reports that nobody bothers
to click on anyway?  Note that -- according to Mark Crispin, who wrote
the RFCs -- one of the motivations for IMAP was allowing multiple
users to share one copy of a message and its attachments on the
server, although I don't know whether real IMAP servers implement that
for "private" mail.  So just accessing the same document isn't really
a big win by itself.

I think the real advantage, as you say, is in collaborative work,
where everybody is working on the same content (wikiwiki anybody? or
should I say gigagigagiga?)  On the one hand, though, a blot of .doc
and .xls just aren't collaborative, they're just piles of bytes that
supposedly prove effort was made.  On the other, in my experience,
it's still painful, because I'm always tripping over colleagues' poor
taste in organization -- if you try to fix it, they get matd because
they can't find "their stuff".  Life is much easier if evyerybody has
a real repo and can back your changes out without tedious negotiations
(until the group needs to publish :-/ ).  (Well, I'm not sure of that,
because the people are very different.  Maybe the git users are just
more competent!)

WDYT?

Steve