Working from Home

As I mentioned in a previous post, I've been battling a flu lately.

At my worst, I was glad to discover HD streaming video from websites like ABC.com.

At my best, I've been able to do a little work from home - and that's when I was delighted to have Google Docs available.

Yes, our company has VPN (virtual private network), which allows you to access a company file server, at the very least, your entire work computer at best, from another location. And this is great, but does require you to be connected to your VPN while working - and if you are working on a large file, can be slow and cumbersome.

Enter Google docs. Working on a spreadsheet or Word document, you can save your document to your Google account's documents feature, and you can even open these documents for collaboration if you choose.

Once saved, your documents are now available no matter where you are, as long as you are signed on to your Google account.

As Wikipedia tells us, "Documents, spreadsheets, and presentations can be created within the application itself, imported through the web interface, or sent via email. They can also be saved to the user's computer in a variety of formats. By default, they are saved to Google's servers. Open documents are automatically saved to prevent data loss. Documents can be tagged and archived for organizational purposes.

Collaboration between users is also a feature of Google Docs. Documents can be shared, opened, and edited by multiple users at the same time."

There are two negatives to Google docs, neither of which is insignificant, but both of them relative to what you are trying to do: one is that there is a limit to how much each account can store on the Google servers (which is, after all, where your documents will be stored). And the second is that as your documents are stored on the Google servers, there is the potential for compromise.

That being said, I would never presume to store a proprietary document on Google Docs, and for the most part, what I work on using this service are short terms jobs, not long term, large and complicated files.

Yep, being sick just got easier!