Jay Eye Sea

I wrote the following in reply to a question on Training Tech News, a VNU newsletter focused on technology and tools related to corporate training. The question regarded how to share files that are too large for email during e-learning development projects. Most answers focused on the usual corporate suspects: Microsoft SharePoint, Documentum eRooms, and Lotus Sametime, with little mention of free services such as Box.net. I decided to take a different angle, and look at how Gmail could solve this problem, even if you don’t want to use it as your primary email:

Don’t use email, use Gmail (or googlemail as it’s called in the UK). Gmail supports attachments of up to 20 MB which should be more than adequate for your reader’s 5-15 MB requirement, and provides 2-6 GB of storage per user free of charge.

If each Subject Matter Expert and Instructional Designer signs up for a Gmail account, they can send the files between them, and as Gmail ‘threads’ mails according to their subject, rather than listing in date order, your inbox looks and feels quite like a private threaded discussion board.

So that you don’t have to constantly check this email account in addition to your usual one, you can download one of several desktop notifiers including Google Talk or the Gmail Notifier for FireFox. Alternatively, Gmail provides a private RSS feed of your inbox, so you can be alerted in your RSS reader whenever there is a new email. Finally, Gmail supports IMAP so if you use MS Outlook you can configure it to download your Gmail in addition to your MS Exchange or other email account.

Regarding collaboration, Google Docs allows you import MS Word documents and Spreadsheets and work on them on-line. Multiple users can work at once, and changes appear more or less in real time (you can control who has access to the document as a either collaborator or a viewer). There is also a chat window built so you can discuss the document as well. Finished documents can be downloaded in a variety of formats (Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, etc) or published directly to the Internet as HTML documents. It is possible to see a history of changes to the document and revert to an older version.

The two drawbacks are

1. the formatting options are not as rich as with desktop Word Processing packages, and
2. there’s no option to work off-line (although there is evidence to suggest this is on its way) - although you can export the document, work off-line, then import it again. A ‘web-based office suite’ competitor to Google Docs, Zoho does have an integrated option to work off-line.