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All of us at Cloud Assist are enjoying the real time collaborative typing in Google Docs. June is the month of graduations and new beginnings for millions of students around the world. The Google Docs team is also continually learning and we’re happy to announce that the new documents and spreadsheets editors have both graduated. 

Documents
Beginning today and rolling out over the next couple of weeks, all new documents will be created using the new documents editor. Docs already created using the older editor will remain there. We will be sharing more information on how to move those documents to the new version soon. 

The new editor was built for faster real-time collaboration, better imports, and more control over your document’s layout. Since the preview, we’ve added lots of features including a table of contents, a special characters dialog, a dictionary, search as-you-type, and re-sizable images. You can learn more about the new document editor here.

Spreadsheets
The new version of spreadsheets is available as the default to everyone starting today. Since thelaunch of the new spreadsheets, we’ve added a lot of new features, including formula highlighting, sheet dragging, sheet menu, faster scrolling, an editable formula bar, and autocomplete in cells, copy sheet from one spreadsheet to another and range sorting.

GoogleLookup and spreadsheet gadgets, which will be added to the new editor shortly, can still be used in the old version which can be accessed by clicking on the “Old version” link in the top right of any spreadsheet. The old version will be available for a few more weeks..

Thanks to everyone who has tried out the new editors over the last couple of months. Your feedback has been very valuable as we prepared to make it available to everyone. The new editors also let us develop new features more quickly, so let us know what you think on the forums.

Finally, there’s also good news for Google Apps customers: these new editors will become their default soon as well. We’ll begin activating the new editor for documents on June 21 and for spreadsheets on June 30.

Source: http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/06/new-google-docs-graduates.html

Filed under: Cloud Assist, Google Apps, Google Apps for Business, Innovative Innovation, Managed Migration, Maximising Mobility, regular, Tech News, Technology by Neil Rutherfoord

Since the launch of Google Docs drawings, we’ve been excited to see you not only create really impressive and useful drawings, but also actively share them with the world. In order to make it easier for you to share your drawings, we’ve added drawings to the Google Docs template gallery. Sharing via the gallery gives you categories, ratings, and even usage counts for drawings you’ve submitted.

Here are a couple examples of drawing templates currently in the gallery:

Some other examples already available include a coin puzzle, a series of United States maps, a business model example, isometrics, a floor plan, and an interactive learning object.

Go check out the drawings in the gallery, and please submit your best drawings to the public, so that everyone can easily take advantage of your hard work. And, let us know if you’ve made something that will blow our minds, and you’d like us to feature your drawing here on the Google Docs blog.

Source: http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/06/share-your-drawings-with-google-docs.html

Filed under: regular by Neil Rutherfoord

On Tuesday Google announced the completion of a new web indexing system called Caffeine. Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content they’ve offered. Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before.

Some background for those of you who don’t build search engines for a living like us: when you search Google, you’re not searching the live web. Instead you’re searching Google’s index of the web which, like the list in the back of a book, helps you pinpoint exactly the information you need. (Here’s a good explanation of how it all works.)

So why did we build a new search indexing system? Content on the web is blossoming. It’s growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average webpage is richer and more complex. In addition, people’s expectations for search are higher than they used to be. Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.

To keep up with the evolution of the web and to meet rising user expectations, we’ve built Caffeine. The image below illustrates how our old indexing system worked compared to Caffeine:

Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you.

With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published.

Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.

We’ve built Caffeine with the future in mind. Not only is it fresher, it’s a robust foundation that makes it possible for us to build an even faster and comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online, and delivers even more relevant search results to you. So stay tuned, and look for more improvements in the months to come.

Filed under: regular by Neil Rutherfoord

Cloud Assist are delighted to announce that we are now a Gold Member Partner with Kentico. 

Filed under: regular by Neil Rutherfoord