September 22nd, 2007
A couple days ago, I noticed a posting on John Battelle’s SearchBlog blog that Google Apps now has a Powerpoint-clone presentation package; and since many of my conference and seminar presentations have been created with Powerpoint over the years, I decided to take a look…
… and I’m hooked. Make no mistake: this isn’t really Powerpoint, just as the word-processor and spreadsheet capabilities in Google Apps are not really the same as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. But it’s okay for now, especially because it encourages sharing and collaboration. As far as I can tell, after some relatively brief experiments, the presentation package doesn’t support any of the animation or “build” features in Powerpoint, which means that it’s totally unsuitable for me as a mechanism for creating new presentations from scratch. However, it’s capable of importing existing Powerpoint files — which obviously means that I can create a new presentation in Powerpoint, with whatever animation/build features I want, and then import the finished result into Google Apps for viewing and collaboration. For the most part, that seems to work fine — except that JPEG images that I had created as clickable hyperlinks in the original Powerpoint file are no longer clickable in Google Apps. That’s moderately annoying, but not a show-stopper; hopefully, it’s somewhere on a list of improvements that the Google techies are planning for some future release…
I’ve decided to experiment with the Google Apps presentation package, and I’ve begun by importing the most recent version of my one-hour presentation on managing Death-March projects. You can view it by clicking here; let me know what you think. If you’re interested in updating/correcting/revising/refining the material, send me an email (at ed-at-yourdon-dot-com) and I’ll add you to the list of collaborators. That will give you the ability to change the presentation, add new slides, delete slides you don’t like, etc.
As I learn more about the strengths, weaknesses, quirks, and idiosyncrasies of Google Apps, I plan to add some more presentations to my publicly-available collection. Most important, I’m now seriously considering converting my massive Web 2.0 mind-map into this format, so that it can be uploaded, shared, and updated by the community at large … In general, the ability to share and collaborate with a large, worldwide community is such a powerful concept that it outweighs most (though not all) of the concerns that I would otherwise have about features and functions in a comparison between Microsoft Office and Google Apps.
If you have any suggestions or comments on how best to use this new Google product — or warnings and advice, based on your own experiences — please share them with me, so that I don’t waste any more time than necessary. Meanwhile, I’ll do my best to share my experiences as I learn more about it myself…
September 25th, 2007 at 3:13 am
Make Sure You Read the Fine Print before
making a Career (or Income) Limiting Move
- to see why see the article at http://www.pcprofile.com/Office_Collaboration.pdf that I wrote some months ago on the topic.
Great tool, great concept, BUT it has a big downside for the unwary. It’s not as plain sailing as many would like to believe.
If you want to share your IP with the rest of the world and have it all over servers everywhere, go for it, but those of us that make a living out of IP matters, it’s a real issue.
It’s an even bigger issue if you want to have commercial secrets and decide to collaborate using Google Apps, the Ts and Cs will kill you, and not with laughter!
Are you aware that for anything you load up into Google Apps you immediately grant a license to Google to use in any way they so choose? Read their fine print.
Whilst you might own the IP, you are also assigning them rights to it as well!
Is that what you had in mind for confidential documents, spreadsheets, presentations etc?
I suspect not.
Use Google Apps with caution!