May 3rd, 2007
Using Google to replace Sharepoint, LimitNone's gShare bridges MS-Office/Google Apps divide
Over the last couple of weeks, I have spent a lot of my time writing about Google Apps as though it could be a replacement for Microsoft Office. I still believe that for many companies and users, it either is, will be, or can be such a replacement. 
There are a great many users who only require the most basic of functionality out of their productivity software but who also end up with something like Microsoft Office if for no other reason than compatibility with the other people they interact with. With the events company that Doug Gold and I started last year (Mass Events Labs), a lot of documents get exchanged not just amongst ourselves, but also with organizations external to us and Office is always the common dominator. Documents are Word-based. Spreadsheets are Excel-based. Presentations are PowerPoint-based. But the usage of Microsoft Office is strictly for inter-organizational file interoperation. Not because of any of the special features in Office.
If you're really looking for frictionless, look no further than Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets.
In my day job, I can't remember the last time I used a complicated feature in Microsoft Office. 100 percent of the text documents I now originate are originated in e-mail (for different inboxes, I use Outlook and Thunderbird), Wordpress (ZDNet's blogging infrastructure), Twiki (the internal wiki used by CNET Networks), or one of Mass Events Labs MediaWiki-based wikis. I can't remember the last time I originated a document in Word. But some percentage of the press releases I receive come in Word format. Still, other attachments from vendors are often in PowerPoint. The rest are straight e-mail or PDF. If it wasn't for the few PowerPoint presentations I assemble each year, or the occasional need to create a spreadhseet, my installation of Microsoft Office would be relegated to reading documents and nothing else. At Mass Events Labs where we could end up with as many as five people collaborating on information, I've setup Google Apps to be our collaborative document backbone.
But Google Apps, like many other Web apps, doesn't yet have the offline problem solved (like Zimbra, I think it will, but for now, it doesn't) and for some users and organizations, being able to collaborate on documents and spreadsheets, even when in a disconnected mode, is imperative. Like me in my jobs at CNET and Mass Events Labs, the need for inter-organizational interoperability equates to having Microsoft Office on our systems and it is for this reason that Office ends up being the default offline tool.
In Microsoft's world, the way you get normally get people to collaborate on Office documents is through a Sharepoint Server. You could do it by passing documents around in e-mail and using the Track Changes feature of Word. But relative to approaches like Sharepoint where one copy of a shared document is centrally stored and checked in or out for changes (and the controls for doing so are integrated into Microsoft Office), things can get out of hand when a document is shared via e-mail. Multiple copies that are completely out of synch with each other end up as attachments in various inboxes and the effort required to resolve the differences can easily wipe out any gains in organizational productivity that were expected from the collaborative context in the first place. On the other hand, when compared to e-mail, Sharepoint isn't exactly a frictionless solution. It's not frictionless to implement, nor is it frictionless to use. Even though it's probably less efficient in the long run, e-mail feels more efficient. It involves fewer moving parts and, from a process perspective, can take less time to open, edit, close, and distribute a document.
But if you're really looking for frictionless, look no further than Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets. As I've written before, compared to what's there in the mainstream now, Google Docs and Spreadsheets is like pure collaborative oxygen. I need no local software. No specific operating system. No system administrators. For you to begin collaborating with someone else, all you need is a browser. Google takes care of the rest to the point that when you make a change to a document, that change simply shows up seconds later on anybody else's screen (anybody else who currently has the document open). We could argue about whether the process of checking documents in and checking them out makes more sense in terms of avoiding conflicting changes. But I think that's secondary to the friction that Google has removed from both the end user experience as well as the implementation part.
So, where am I going with this? Well, suppose you're sold on the frictionless approach to collaboration that Google has taken, but are still in a world where you can't easily ween yourself (and your users) from Microsoft Office. Maybe Office is the key to interorganizational document interoperation. Maybe it's just what you're users want to use because they're used to using it. Maybe it has those special features that you need that aren't available in other productivity offerings (browser-based or not). Maybe you want to migrate to something lighter weight like Google Apps over the long run but it will be a migration nevertheless. The old and new systems will have to run in parallel and interoperate.
As a result of what I've been writing over the last couple weeks, one company — LimitNone — contacted me with a solution called gShare that bridges the MS-Office/Google Apps divide. If I had to sum it up in two sentences, they would go like this: On the one hand, it's for companies looking to use Microsoft Office as the offline client for Google Apps. On the other hand, it's also for companies that, for a variety of reasons, want to rip out Sharepoint and replace it with a substitute that integrates equally well into Office, but that's powered by Google. Although my next step is to test it out, from the datasheet that LimitNone sent me, gShare has some features that sound very cool:
- You can highlight any cells or text (contiguous or non-contiguous) in a spreadsheet or document (relatively speaking) and export the cells or text to Google as a new Google spreadsheet or document.
- When exporting to Google, you can specify collaborators and viewers for the newly created spreadsheet or document. Collaborators and viewers are instantly notified via email.
- Once the Google spreadsheet(s) or document(s) are updated, users can click a "synchronize button" to synch those changes with the locally stored spreadsheet(s) or document(s) as though they were manually entered inside Excel or Word.
- gSHARE also stores your spreadsheets and documents online so they can be accessed from any machine connected to the Internet, provided that the appropriate Microsoft Office products are installed. As part of this service, gSHARE provides automatic backups, versioning and the ability to revert to previous versions stored on the Googles servers.
gShare also support programmatic workflow and provides dashboards that help users manage the metadata that results from collaboration (eg: you can see the last time documents were synched, you can roll-back a synch, and cells in spreadsheets that change from one synch to the next get highlighted). To get a copy of this datasheet — appropriately titled Google and Microsoft Living together in harmony — LimitNone is mistakenly requiring potential customers to leave some contact information on its Web site. It's a very 90's-esque tactic that drives me nuts. Perhaps this blog entry will convince them to make the document more freely available.
Not having used gShare yet, I can't vouch for how well it works. But, at the very least, for the George Ou's of the world who can recite all the reasons it makes sense to have a full-bodied office suite (as well as the reasons something like Google Apps makes no sense), gShare appears to allow users to dip a toe in both worlds, have their cake, and eat it too.
