Tech Tools: Working on the Web

 

By Ricardo Harvin
E-mail Questions for Tech Tools to techtools@uschamber.com.

 

For most Web users, Google is synonymous with search. But if you think of Google only as a search engine, you're missing out on a lot of what the company has to offer.

 

Google now has a wide range of free and low-cost tools available for businesses, consumers, and developers-many of which have nothing to do with search.

 

For businesses, one of the more compelling offerings is the new Google Apps product, a collection of online services including e-mail, calendaring, and instant messaging. Of special value is the Docs & Spreadsheets program, which is available as a part of Google Apps and as a separate product.

 

Docs & Spreadsheets moves two critical business productivity tools (word processing and spreadsheets) from the computer desktop to the online world at prices that are hard to ignore. The stand-alone product and the Standard Edition of Google Apps are free; the Premier Edition costs $50 per user per year.

 

Both the Standard and the Premier editions provide administrative tools for you to control access to your documents and create Web pages. The Premier Edition also allows you to extend Docs & Spreadsheets' functionality through third-party products and services and with your own custom programming. Technical support (online for the Standard Edition; 24/7, including phone support, for the Premier Edition) and all maintenance and upgrades are included.

 

Docs & Spreadsheets works with most standard file formats such as Microsoft Word documents (.doc) and Excel files (.xls), as well as with PDF, OpenOffice, HTML, text, and RTF files.

 

The potential benefits of moving your documents online include easier collaboration and the elimination of maintenance and upgrade costs. The collaboration features alone can help improve teamwork and productivity. For example, the revision history feature lets you go back and retrieve an older version of a document if someone has deleted important information.

 

The potential downsides include situations where you don't have an Internet connection or when the service is down, which means that you can't get to your documents. Working with complex documents that Docs & Spreadsheets may not be able to handle or with documents that exceed Google's current file size and storage space restrictions also pose potential challenges.

 

Every business needs to look at what Google is doing. Established desktop software companies are currently working on their own versions of what's being done with Google Apps, and it's very likely that before too long the desktop for every business will extend to the Web.