Google says sharing is caring and expands Group capabilities

18 Aug 2009

Reflecting the general move by businesses to ‘go Google’ Google has rolled out improvements to the way that Google Groups interacts with Google applications such as sharing calendars, sites and documents with multiple groups of people.

Instead of adding people one at a time users can now share knowledge with an entire Google Group.

“Imagine you’re organising a local team tournament,” said Jeffrey Chang, associate product manager for Google Groups. “You use Google Docs to keep track of the rosters for each team as well as each team’s performance.

“You want all the players, but only the players, to have editing access. You already have a Google Group set up with the tournament participants, so you simply share the spreadsheet with the group itself, granting the group members permission to edit.

“Now, when people join or leave the Google Group, they will automatically gain or lose editing access to the spreadsheet. It’s that easy.

“This was a feature that people wanted to ‘just work’ — and now it does,” Chang said.

By John Kennedy

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com