It’s a fantastic feeling to be able to announce this integration. We’ve been working on this feature for quite some time, refining the functionality and battling with Google’s Docs API.
We wanted the Teamwork Google Docs integration to be as smooth and flexible as our Dropbox integration. At times it felt like fitting a round peg in a square hole. Google Docs are not exactly files and they are not placed in folders as such but live in Collections.
We looked at many other cloud apps out there and how they handled Google Docs and we found them lacking. All these apps just gave a list of your Google Docs. No categorization, no folder structure and no way to allow editing of these documents without first sharing them with the user.
We knew we could do better, and we did!Like Dropbox, Google Docs can be shared with multiple users. This allows us to link one main Google Doc account in to each Teamwork account to be used as the document repository. Individual users can then share their documents with this main account and the files magically show up in Teamwork.
For example:
Internally we created a new Google Docs account info@teamworkpm.net and linked that in to our Teamwork account. The rest of the team then shared out their own personal documents they want to share to info@teamworkpm.net and the files show up in Teamwork.
Hooking your Google Docs account into Teamwork is a very simple process. Click Settings in the top right of your Teamwork account, choose Site Settings and pick the Integrations tab.
I have also run through all these steps in the short video I have attached here so you can see exactly how to hook your Google Docs account up with Teamwork.
As you would have seen from the video, if you watched it ;-) was that you can also create Google Docs from within your TeamworkPM account. It's a great enhancement and something that was brought up a good few times by the users who took part in the beta test. So we took the feedback on board and Dan got to work building this in for the final release. We also added the ability to create "folders/collections"
The last really important thing to run through is the Access Control for a Google Doc. By default, linking a Google Doc in to Teamwork sets the access control on the document to be viewable by any person who has the link.
You can set this to one of 3 levels
- Anybody with the link can view
- Anybody with the link can view and edit
- Do not modify the access control list - This means that you have to explicitly share the document with Google Account holders from inside Google Docs.
After I finished the video (typical ;-)) we made a slight change to highlight the Access Control settings more and make it more obvious to users.
As with all our new features, we really hope you like it. We enjoyed building it and we look forward to hearing your feedback.