Tag Archives: collaboration

Google opens up discussions on docs

I attended a briefing today on Google Apps. Google is celebrating over 1 million business customers in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) since the launch of Google Apps just over 4 years ago, and over 3 million worldwide. An unknown proportion of those customers are small businesses using the free edition; but there are some well-known names which have signed up, including Rentokil Initial, Virgin America, Motorola, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and Jaguar Landrover.

The big announcement today is called Discussions in Google Docs, and I have had a quick try with a short document that I opened for discussion. One thing I learned is that if you want to allow public discussion on a document, you have to make it world-editable (like a wiki). It should be possible to have the document locked but still enable comments, but I cannot see how to do that; it seems that leaving a comment requires the same rights as editing the document.

Another oddity is that there are two comment panels, a narrow column on the right

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and a big blue panel that appears if you select Show Discussions from the top menu.

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If you are logged in, you can request notifications by email and even add comments by replying to email notifications.

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There is also a per-comment feature mysteriously called Resolve. A resolved comment is semi-deleted; it is removed from the comment stream (narrow panel) but still appears in the full discussion (big blue panel).

My snap judgment is that these comments/discussions will be useful for document collaboration, which is already among the strongest features of Google Apps.