Aug
19
Picked up this piece from Infoweek about a new feature for sharing Docs with Google groups. While this might be attractive to me if I was starting to set up Yu Ying’s googlesphere from scratch, it will be a cumbersome implementation now. I also came across this note about sharing / security concerns with Google Docs, personal edition, and Google’s response.
As we go into our second year we face these fundamental challenges with running Yu Ying as an “all Google Apps” shop:
- Docs is not quite robust enough for a lot of (simple) things teachers need to do.
- Docs sharing across a large or dyunamic group is too tedious, and since tags are not shared, data is not organized the way users that are familiar with a “shared folders on a file server” paradigm.
- Sites permission settings are not nearly sophisticated enough. Neither granular enough, nor inherited.
- Sites editor is great for the creation and management of a simple site by someone who is moderately tech savvy, but not sophisticated enough of a CMS for a diverse organization with users who just need to post updates, add photos and do a few simple things. As a result the teachers either (a) don’t use it enough, or (b) take way too much artistic license with layout and design, rendering the site very inconsistent in appearance.
We need to move onto the next iteration of school web tools.
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