Paula Rojas Blog

Tired of running out to different businesses with all kinds of slide projectors and copies of presentations all for time-consuming meetings? Are you too busy handling day-to-day business activities to keep doing proposals and presentations that are required to increase your business? If the answer to either of these questions is Yes, then you have the option of presenting your work in formats that Google Apps or your Web site can present online.

Docs & Spreadsheets will handle HTML, Word, Excel, or other formats; Page Creator can be used to publish HTML files as well as JPEG or GIF images or PDF files. If you use a Web page to show a layout, a sketch, or other proposal, you don’t have to make the presentation visible to the wider public either give out a ‘‘secret’’ URL (a URL that leads to a page to which there are no hypertext links, and that visitors learn about by getting the address from the company) or set up password authentication for the directory on your Web server that holds the presentation.

Then issue a password to the company that needs to see your stuff. You’ll save yourself and your clients the time and trouble involved in setting up meetings. As questions occur, they can send you e-mail or speak on the phone or even hold ‘‘virtual meetings’’ using Gmail or Google Talk.

Security Considerations

It’s natural to approach the prospect of putting financial or personnel information online with caution. Such data needs to be protected, and simply putting out a ‘‘private’’ URL won’t do it. In that case you need to rely on the sorts of Internetbased security schemes authentication and encryption that are already making e-commerce and information exchange viable in cyberspace.

Authentication is the process of requiring someone to verify that they are an approved user by providing a username and password. In technical terms, this means that the directory on the Web server that holds the sensitive Web page, graphics, or other files is set up so that, whenever a visitor connects to that directory, a standard password-protection box is presented. In the case of Google Apps, an approved user needs to enter a Google Account username/password pair that matches one of a set that your site’s administrator enters. The big question mark with regard to Google Apps in the corporate world is security.

Suppose you open your Google Apps domain to selected customers and others outside the company. The question to ask is: once your passwords start getting ‘‘out there’’ in the world, how do you protect your company’s information from hackers, thieves, and other unauthorized intruders? Google Apps, at both the standard and Premium level, uses a simple password system to limit access to the site as a whole. You can’t password-protect areas within the site though when a user logs in with his or her password, he or she can only view Docs & Spreadsheets files that he or she has created or that other users have specifically allowed that user to view.

But passwords aren’t the only key to keeping business information secure. The first, and in many ways the most effective, step in ensuring the security of your Internet-based network is to assemble the key players on your staff and initiate communication about security. Get together the managers, computer managers, and legal staff. Discuss possible solutions, such as keeping sensitive information off the network altogether.