Google, some­times you are water to a drown­ing man. With your fancy, model-breaking free ser­vices, your forever-beta atti­tude, your kick­ing font. So many ser­vices, so many con­fig­u­ra­tions, so many thought­ful ways for a sim­ple man like myself to divulge my per­sonal infor­ma­tion.



But this month, you have show­ered me with use­ful things. So man, in fact, that I have to shout it from the rooftops.

For Google Apps Users

I’ve been a rav­ing lunatic for Google Apps since they launched. For those not famil­iar with the ser­vice, Google Apps allows you to take your domain name (like fifthandmain.com) and map all your famil­iar Google ser­vices to it. Use the nearly bul­let­proof Gmail ser­vice for your business’s email using your own domain, and have cal­en­dars, doc­u­ments, inter­nal web­sites, and more all hosted and shared across team mem­bers. There are three tiers of Google Apps: Edu­ca­tion, Stan­dard, and Pre­miere. At this time, only the pre­miere level of ser­vice has a fee asso­ci­ated with it — $50/user per year.

That’s all back­story non­sense, though. The big news is here.

Pre­sen­ta­tions get Collaboration

Google Docs

For some time now, when work­ing on a doc­u­ment in Google Docs (the company’s Microsoft Office chal­lenger) you’ve been able to col­lab­o­rate with other users in real time; work­ing on a spread­sheet, you’d be able to see the cells your col­lab­o­ra­tor is work­ing on as they’re edit­ing them — same in word pro­cess­ing doc­u­ments. This month, you can now col­lab­o­rate as you build pre­sen­ta­tion decks, too. From Google: “Now, when edit­ing a pre­sen­ta­tion with a co-editor, you can see which slides he is edit­ing, and if he is edit­ing the same slide, then you can see which ele­ment — text box, shape, image, video, etc — he is edit­ing.“

This is great news for those of us who col­lab­o­rate with oth­ers while writ­ing online. For those who don’t col­lab­o­rate online, the mes­sage here: you should start. That is all.

Shared Fold­ers in Google Docs

Google Docs

If you’ve used Google Docs for any length of time inside an orga­ni­za­tion, you’ve likely run into the num­ber one frus­tra­tion in keep­ing your work in order with oth­ers: you can’t share fold­ers of doc­u­ments.

It seems like a small thing. “Just share one doc­u­ment at a time, Pete,” you’re say­ing. Sure, punk, I’ll do that. Until I get a list of 30–40 doc­u­ments for a project and have to orga­nize shar­ing with 6 team mem­bers … one doc at a time. After … ahem … not very long, you start look­ing for alter­na­tives.

Not any­more! Huz­zah from the moun­tain high! Google has released Shared Fold­ers for Google Docs. This means, share a folder with those same 6 team mem­bers and all the doc­u­ments, spread­sheets and pre­sen­ta­tions you dump into it get shared as well. I kid you not: this is one of those lit­tle fea­tures that will change the way you look at Google Docs as a seri­ous col­lab­o­ra­tion tool. If you aren’t spend­ing much time in Docs now, you owe it to your­selves and your teams to try it out.

Google Groups goes Apps Premiere

Google Apps Pre­miere

This is a big one. Big like the first iced cake, or the first round tire. Google Apps finally gets Google Groups built in. If you haven’t expe­ri­enced the Groups plat­form, head over to groups.google.com for a taste. Then remove the spam and the porn, and imag­ine a nice, clean dis­cus­sion forum just for your com­pany. Your brand­ing, your con­ver­sa­tions, your col­or­ful ver­nac­u­lar. Adding a rich forum to your inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tion infra­struc­ture can be a real boon to team col­lab­o­ra­tion and pro­duc­tiv­ity. Microsoft has the same fea­ture set built into their enter­prise tool, Share­point, which is as fan­tas­tic as it is com­plex. That Google has reduced the bar­ri­ers to entry to such pit­tance should go to under­score the game-changing-ness that this rep­re­sents.

The only down­side: it’s only for the big spenders in the Apps Pre­miere and Edu­ca­tion floors. Those of us at the stan­dard level — the free­load­ers — don’t get the glitz of Groups. Not now, likely not ever.

Browser Size tool in Google Labs

Google Browser Size

Finally, a tool for all you peo­ple who are stuck on how big your web pages are in the browser. The kind folks in the Google usabil­ity group have ana­lyzed a sam­ple of the search hits they get and drilled down to the size of each user’s browser.

Google Browser Size is a visu­al­iza­tion of browser win­dow sizes for peo­ple who visit Google. For exam­ple, the “90%” con­tour means that 90% of peo­ple vis­it­ing Google have their browser win­dow open to at least this size or larger.

This is use­ful for ensur­ing that impor­tant parts of a page’s user inter­face are vis­i­ble by a wide audi­ence. On the exam­ple page that you see when you first visit this site, there is a “donate now” but­ton which falls within the 80% con­tour, mean­ing that 20% of users can­not see this but­ton when they first visit the page. 20% is a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber; know­ing this fact would encour­age the designer to move the but­ton much higher in the page so it can be seen with­out scrolling.

I tend to design for the larger browsers, if I can hit 90% (in the light blue area), I’m happy. Here’s a recent design in the tool:

It’s beau­ti­ful. Very quick, easy, and free visu­al­iza­tion of design and effi­cacy on the web. Check it out!