Pan Narrans

To my dismay there are some unfortunate snags in Google Groups when it comes to collaborative work. I’m not sure whether these are “features”, or if there is some unknown logic behind the reason why they have been implemented that way. I realize that I have a tendency to bash different technologies and software solutions, but in my defense: this is (mainly O:)) because I want to get to the bottom of things.

So what it is that bothers me in Google Groups? - The page edit timestamps and who is the last editor are missing from the front page.

We can see who has created the page and when, but we do not see when it has been edited last time and by whom. Now, this information is available in the page itself, and the last edited information is available when “Pages” is selected from the menu. BUT, there is no information in the Pages subpage who is the last editor. Ok, it is not that big of a deal right now as we only have a couple of pages.

Combine that with the fact that we cannot set the local time user-specific. So at some point of time we will end up with ten pages and edit times are expressed in 12-hour clock only, the local time being set to who knows what. As a result the only way to make sure that there are no new edits, we have to check every single page manually to be sure of this. So we already have nine or so blogs to follow and now we have ten more pages that we need to check every time we want to get up to date. Sounds like a big fat waste of time to me.

Another thing is that there is no way to set the actual language preference in which you will always see the pages. I tried to access our group with Internet Explorer and got everything in Finnish. The most ridiculous thing was that when I edited a page it tried to send an email to the whole group informing them about the edit in Finnish. I kid you not.

Let’s list some positive features so this post won’t be all negative. :D

PROS:

• Page-specific access control
• Can be made “members only” completely
• Email notification of new messages (Is this discussion threads only?)
• 100mb of space for files
• RSS feed for Discussion topics and messages (no feed for page edits though :/)
• Don’t be evil.

There might be something else, but I’m off to watch Into the Wild and enjoy some banged grain. Please leave a comment if you disagree or have more information.