www.paulnixon.org

Google Docs

Google Docs has nearly come of age I think.

We've been trialling it for word processing documents and spreadsheets and, by and large, it has worked very well.

On the plus side

It's great to be able to share documents with colleagues and customers, brilliant that you can work on the same documents at the same time and most of the functionality that I actually use in MS Office is available. Being able to access a document from anywhere with an internet connection is awesome.

There are a few negatives.

Bugs, bugs, bugs. Renaming files is a nightmare. The service is also a little unreliable. The word processor is much more basic than the spreadsheet. Logins - google needs a unified login like MS Passport. I've ended up with a different login for gmail, docs, adwords. Maybe this is my fault, maybe not.

On balance, the service can only get better I think. We've also taken advantage of the 'sites' functionality which enables you to set up your own 'wiki' which is very handy. We've used it for our induction.