Currently I carry an external hard drive with me on which I store all my personal non-work things that you typically don’t want to expose to the administrators on the network at work. Although this is a very workable solution it becomes a bit of a schlep when you have to haul it out of your bag every time you need to reference a document when you’re on the phone to somebody disputing payment or figures.

I eventually started mailing all my docs to my gmail account, which provided me with all the document management features I could need. I can label my docs (mails), search for them (or the subject of the mail rather), and if you trust Google then you believe that your docs are both securely hidden away behind their security infrastructure and that it’s backed up so that you’ll never lose it.

The gmail document management solution sufficed, but I ended up with a ton of labels and the mail-oriented interface just doesn’t work that well as a file browser and explorer. Although there are many document management solutions available, some even free and OSS as I like it, you are still left with a management nightmare. Performing backups and creating restores is hardly my idea of keeping fun, and that completely eliminates any personal solution, whether free or not.

I’ve been a long-time fan of Sharepoint. The collaboration features are fantastic and it is overall a very usable system. Of course I will never run Sharepoint at home (not sure it runs on OpenSUSE…) which explains my utter excitement when a friend told me about Google Sites – Google’s free online collaboration tool.

Sites integrates with Google Apps, and luckily I’ve set up my Apps previously in an earlier experiment (the joys of having your own domain). I immediately set about creating my site and starting uploading all my pdf scanned documents I’ve been carrying around on my external drive. Sites allows you to create a logical folder structure and as it’s intended to be a collaboration tool you can always invite other people to, err, collaborate with you on your documents. Google Docs have provided collaboration for a long time, but you could never (that I knew of) upload a pdf to Docs.

So looking at the entire Google Apps suite; email, documents, calendar, chat, web pages, and sites you have to wonder when companies are going to wake up to the fact that they don’t need their own collaboration infrastructure and that they don’t have to keep paying Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint administrators and manage SAN storage to ensure that their staff can receive mails and collaborate on documents – securly of course.

Once again, well done Google!