Time to Google

I think the time is near for my official adoption of Cloud Collaborative services such as offered by Google. My post “New Playing Field” back in 9/08 mentioned that I was leaning in this direction but I was not driven by the common Higher Ed response to turn over services such as email for cost savings and reliability improvement. And that is still not a major concern, hosting email even on Exchange is not that big of a deal and it does have some advantages. Maybe I don’t get as concerned about E-Discovery since we have never had a request. But we will probably go down the Google outsourcing path instead of upgrading to a new Exchange Server especially now with Google’s impressive iPhone syncing opportunities.

But what is really driving me to move all of our accounts over to Google is to facilitate the incredible opportunity for online academic collaboration. The difference really struck me the other day while sitting in on our Hybrid Learning Program Team meeting where they were all working off the same Google Spreadsheet and it was the same as the most sophisticated shared space or whiteboard tool. It was live editing by whoever took control and all participants viewed this in real time. Heck, just being able to track from someone else’s cursor movements convinced me. Then I saw that it was almost as good on the iPhone, you just had to manually refresh.

Yes it is good, but we must also remember that the Google Apps, Docs, Sites, etc. represents just some of the pieces of the Digital Teaching and Learning experience. We still feel that the LMS is the launch zone. You still need dependable options for voice and text chat (but Google continues to improve in this area). Media distribution only gets easier, the challenge remains with content creation. Your ERP portal plays a role and everything points to your mobile strategy. And we get most of this by just allowing our collaborations to be mined for marketing profiles. I can live with that.