Costs
*: We become reliant on Google (and the UW to keep paying Google)
-*: You require internet access to Google to view or edit a design document; offline mode is not supported. (See "Offline support" below.)
+*: Offline access requires Google Chome
+*: Offline editing is not risk free. You're at the mercy of Google's merge algorithm, and changes may be lost. (See "Offline support" below.)
+
Probably not costs
*: We lose advanced formatting; Google Drive is a simple word processor. But do we really need it?
@@ -40,17 +42,14 @@
{subsection: Offline support}
-_UW Google Apps does not have offline support enabled._ DoIT says that this is apparently something that could be enabled. Alan has a request to have it enabled, but is not optimistic.
+Around June 28th, 2013, DoIT enabled Offline support. You'll need to explicitly enable it, and be sure connect online before going offline so you'll have the most recent versions.
+{link: https://kb.wisc.edu/googleapps/page.php?id=31141 How to enable offline mode}
Offline support is Chrome only.
-Offline support is untested. In particular, it's not clear how it handles conflicts. Hopefully conflicts are rare, but they will happen occasionally.
-
-https://support.google.com/drive/answer/1628467
-
-http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/09/whats-different-about-new-google-docs_22.html (Old. not necessarily how offline conflicts are handled)
+Merging of offline and online charges are automatically resolved by Google without any notification. Conflicts are silently resolved _which means work could potentially silently disappear._ A quick test merged pretty well, but if an offline user added a sentence to the middle of a paragraph and an online user deleted the paragraph, the paragraph will be gone, including the new sentence. The history will contain no evidence of the lost content.
-"...you'll be able to do full editing of docs while you are offline and when you comeback online it will sync up and resolve all the conflicts." {link: http://www.techradar.com/us/news/software/applications/offline-google-docs-arriving-in-coming-weeks-1082586 source}
+The actual risk is hard to guess. If most people are just adding comments, I'm betting it's extremely safe. If two people are making heavy edits, the risk is probably high.
{subsection: Backups}
@@ -101,6 +100,7 @@
{section: Links}
UW's sites/information
+*: {link: https://kb.wisc.edu/googleapps/page.php?id=31141 How to enable offline mode}
*: {link: https://kb.wisc.edu/googleapps/page.php?id=19067 Benefits of Use}
*: {link: https://kb.wisc.edu/googleapps/top.php?limit=120 Knowledge Base}
*: {link: http://www.doit.wisc.edu/googleapps/faq/ FAQ}
