Google hardly needs my help in promotion but I'm more than happy to raise the flag again for my new best friends at CommonCraft. Got an email today from Lee LeFever, who, with Sachi LeFever, is cranking out the very clear and useful little videos on Web 2.0-y type stuff. This one is Google Docs in Plain English, adding to RSS in Plain English, Wikis in Plain English, and Social Bookmarking in Plain English.
Never heard of Google Docs? I hadn't until about nine months ago when I found myself on a planning call for Enterprise 2.0. A woman for whom I have the deepest respect - and whom I would call first if I started to think I'd completely lost my way in the 2.0-world - said, "Everyone's sending Google Docs around." They are/were? I was, as usual, out of it. Turns out that Google has cracked the collaboration nut, which, of course, has been cracked so many times before, but they made it even easier to share docs (i.e. real documents, spreadsheets, and such not) on the web. It's an alternative to expensive enterprise knowledge management systems (oops, I recently was told that knowledge management is passe as a term) or home-cooking of web sites for document sharing.
What CommonCraft has done is to explain Google's solution, yet again "in plain English." Very well done, once more, Lee and Sachi. And by all means, keep churning out this stuff. Nothing I've seen in years has been this concise and useful. (Google Docs Team was the client for this so thanks to you guys too for commissioning these great conceptual artists.)
And, IT, HR, and Communication departments: Hire them!