{"id":4033,"date":"2011-03-16T17:41:17","date_gmt":"2011-03-16T16:41:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/4033-google-opens-up-discussions-on-docs.html"},"modified":"2011-03-16T17:41:17","modified_gmt":"2011-03-16T16:41:17","slug":"google-opens-up-discussions-on-docs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/4033-google-opens-up-discussions-on-docs.html","title":{"rendered":"Google opens up discussions on docs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>The big announcement today is called <a href=\"http:\/\/googledocs.blogspot.com\/2011\/03\/introducing-discussions-in-google-docs.html\" target=\"_blank\">Discussions in Google Docs<\/a>, and I have had a quick try with a <a href=\"https:\/\/docs.google.com\/document\/d\/1Db4yIulGNErGBGt0I3SWsKyknRjk7rooTcHCkjBGTLI\/edit?hl=en_GB\" target=\"_blank\">short document<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n<p>Another oddity is that there are two comment panels, a narrow column on the right<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/image13.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"background-image: none; border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; margin: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; border-top: 0px; border-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px\" title=\"image\" border=\"0\" alt=\"image\" src=\"http:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/image_thumb13.png\" width=\"193\" height=\"244\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>and a big blue panel that appears if you select Show Discussions from the top menu.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/image14.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"background-image: none; border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; border-top: 0px; border-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px\" title=\"image\" border=\"0\" alt=\"image\" src=\"http:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/image_thumb14.png\" width=\"404\" height=\"212\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>If you are logged in, you can request notifications by email and even add comments by replying to email notifications.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/image15.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"background-image: none; border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; margin: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; border-top: 0px; border-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px\" title=\"image\" border=\"0\" alt=\"image\" src=\"http:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/image_thumb15.png\" width=\"244\" height=\"157\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>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). <\/p>\n<p>My snap judgment is that these comments\/discussions will be useful for document collaboration, which is already among the strongest features of Google Apps.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/4033-google-opens-up-discussions-on-docs.html\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Google opens up discussions on docs<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,36,44],"tags":[267,279,333,426],"class_list":["post-4033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cloud-computing","category-google","category-internet","tag-cloud-computing","tag-collaboration","tag-discussions","tag-google-docs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4033"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4033\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}