Having only just recommended Google Docs in my top ten web tools of 2008, I may now have to remove them from that list!
Why?
I am getting the following error.
Sorry! We are experiencing technical difficulties and cannot show all of your documents.
It would appear that a) I am not alone and b) Google are aware of and working on the issue.
It is annoying and hopefully will be fixed soon.
…such are the joys of relying on outsourced “free” “solutions”. Something to consider when looking at the business risks of using them for anything serious until they become much better established and stable.
While in house solutions might have similar technical issues at times, the risks can usually be better predicted and controlled or mitigated against.
Imagine the horror if something like this happened at a critical time, say shortly before a major hand in deadline where the course work relied on using such outsourced solutions, and the difficulties of verifying the scope and duration of the problem for any subsequent extenuating circumstance cases? – at least in house, the scope of the problem could be easily checked and considered for such claims. If you hadn’t noticed this happening on this occation, would Google have published the timescales and scope of the problems anywhere? As is apparent from this thread:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Docs/thread?tid=3bd6b2d9d0be62c7&hl=en
This has been going on for a number of weeks, only affects some people, and the docs might be still available to others if they are shared – clearly a nightmare for any extenuating circumstances claims without a lot of details from Google – instead they seem to be only saying “we hop it’ll be fixed soon” and I doubt they’ll provide details of the scope of the issue which would be useful later – we’ll see! (and I suspect Google will probably be better at this than many other “free” outsourced solutions)
As of right now, January 4, my documents are still invisible from the Google Docs main page. However, if I have linked to the document from another webpage, I can still view the document through that link.
Yay!
My documents are now back!