14 DAY TRIAL // As Google continues to push its Apps suite with a large-scale advertising campaign underway this month, the company is also adding new features and functionality, one step at a time, as is the norm with Google. The latest addition to the Apps suite is a revamped privileges system that brings the possibility to easily share content with predefined groups of users.
“In my work, being able to communicate and collaborate with many groups of people is crucial to productivity, and I often want to use Google Apps to share content with particular groups or teams. Typing in every user's email address manually is painstaking and inefficient, and remembering when people leave and join different teams is impossible,” Jeffrey Chang, associate product manager for Google Groups, wrote. “Like any user, I want to make sure that I reach the right people, and I want this to be easy and efficient.”
The new feature works by extending the functionality of Google Groups to several applications in the Apps suite but also other products. Document sharing was an obvious choice and now users can share their documents, spreadsheets or other files on Google Docs with existing groups or ones created especially for this. When they decide to share the files there will be the option to make them available for entire groups in the permissions page.
This way, they don't have to manage each individual member. When a user joins a group he will automatically have all the edit and view rights, like all the other members. Leaving the group means all those rights are gone and the whole thing happens automatically. The new group sharing feature is available for other Google products as well, like Calendar, Sites and Video for business. The new capabilities should prove very useful and it's actually surprising to see it took Google this long to introduce such an obvious feature.