General Consultant Discussion

Highlighting a problem with Cloud applications ... My team uses Google Docs for key documents and spreadsheets. Currently the Google Spreadsheets are not working and ... it's kind of a problem for us. One spreadsheet in particular is used as a high level planning tool for who is working on which clients on which weeks. We are a small, 10 person company. What kind of hell is this for larger organizations? In some ways, it's liberating - because there is ZERO that we can do to resolve the problem. No IT people to call. No extra bills to fix it. But in most ways, it's brutal. Thoughts?

Downtime is not specific to cloud applications though I share your thoughts.

Think of it as a blessing - I believe hangouts is down as well (Google Chat). As someone who has tried most of the cloud based messaging and online apps I can say they all go through their respective down time though the deciding factor seems to be for how long they are down. The more popular apps seem to have much shorter and less frequent outages while smaller companies can have a more prolonged interruption.

We're were going through the same thing. Everything appears to be back for us (maybe it's the weather). Liberating? Absolutely. I can't imagine that if there was something we could do about it, the resources that we could employ would equate to the machine that's actually working on this right now.

@WayneSchulz - yes, true. Client installed apps go down. But ... if my spreadsheet doesn't pull up on machine A, I can usually go to machine B. The app itself will work. Sometimes you want have access to your files of course. In this case, it's both at once: the app isn't working and the files are inaccessible. It would be a nice feature to allow a user to download a file without going in to it first. Is that available and I'm just missing it?

Looks like you have to be using a new version of Google Sheets -- and from experience I can say that it does not look as if you can upgrade an existing sheet to the new version (or if you find out how let me know). https://support.google.com/drive/answer/1628467?hl=en

Thanks Wayne. I saw that too. I don't think it's a big deal to copy and paste the old information (once it's back up). I'll test it out.