Collaborate remotely. Collaborate through the clouds. Clarification of the mechanism for sharing information through cloud storage resources Collaboration in the cloud

Mail can boast of a large set of functions. Here you can add mail not only from MyOffice, but also other mail - from Outlook and Exchange to Gmail and Yandex. Mail ". If you know the server of incoming and outgoing mail for your corporate account, add it too.

The mail interface is very nice. The service is built, again, on the principle of "nothing more": only your inbox with the appropriate sections and the ability to write a letter to anyone. All letters are conveniently sorted, which allows you to immediately see messages from the same sender.

The new letter window has everything you might need: text editing tools, the ability to attach a file, create a list, and much more.

The section "Documents" is even more interesting. For now, only test documents and spreadsheets can be created in the cloud, but presentations will be added to them soon.

What I especially like about the product "MyOffice" is a clear interface. The same is with documents and spreadsheets - even if you have never worked in "cloud" editors, you will get comfortable in five minutes. Management tools are conveniently located, there are no hundreds of buttons that are not clear what they are responsible for (beginners in Word will understand).

Currently, up to three users can edit text at the same time. You will see in real time who is editing what. The developer plans to increase the number of co-editing co-authors to 50 co-authors, and as many as a million will be able to view the document.

Summing up a small summary for the web version, we can say that the guys, of course, still have a lot of work to do, and you shouldn't demand all the functions at once - the project is still being finalized. But the fact that Russian developers have created a really cool and high-quality product with great potential cannot but rejoice. The most important thing is that "MyOffice" will be understandable not only for businessmen and young people, but also for the older generation. The universal interface plays an incredible role here.

As for the version for iOS, only the Mail application is still available for the iPhone, where you can also add any email account. The program is equipped with convenient controls and attractive design without sacrificing functionality. In the fall, by the way, on mobile devices other applications "MyOffice" will appear.

It is very pleasant to work with such mail. There are no functions like viewing letters with attachments only, but this is a consequence of the fact that developers do not overload applications, leaving only basic functions. In doing so, they listen to the opinions of users and add new features.

For each mailbox, the main sections are available - such as "Inbox", "Outbox", "Drafts" and so on, which allows you to conveniently navigate a large mail flow. Select several senders (copy if necessary), attach a file - and you're done! Everything is very simple and convenient.

And here is how, for example, the “Documents” application looks like on the iPad. All files are stored only in the cloud and are synchronized between devices when connected to the Internet (however, this will hardly surprise anyone now). Editing is very convenient - you start on your computer and finish on your tablet! And on a tablet with any platform: cross-platform is an important feature of MyOffice.

In the left menu, you can view the documents to which you have been given access, view the marked files, or the trash can. Everything necessary tools for editing are available for both text documents, and tables - setting the font, text, style, and so on. You can even forget about the desktop version and safely perform most of the operations on the tablet.

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The interface of Android applications is very similar to the interface of the program for iOS, and in terms of the set of functions they are almost identical. The applications are very high quality, and this cross-platform is very convenient when editing documents on different devices several users at once.

The advantages of "MyOffice" include user-friendly interface, nice design of programs and cross-platform - this applies to both the web version and mobile applications... The disadvantages could be attributed to the number of available functions for this moment, but the list of opportunities will expand significantly by the end of the year, so this can hardly be called a disadvantage.

Let's summarize. This is really cool: a Russian product, and even so convenient, with a nice interface. True, the functionality is not yet available, but the developers plan to increase it very quickly by the time the service is launched for private users at the end of this year. This version is preliminary - we will definitely test "MyOffice" again after the autumn release and tell you about our impressions.

We decided to send a collective feedback about the conference to the organizers of TechEd Russia 2012. Today I'm going to talk about how we organized collaboration on it using OneDrive.

The initial discussion, of course, was in the mail. When everyone had their say, I collected all the feedback into a Word document and uploaded it to OneDrive. Now it was necessary to give colleagues the opportunity to view the document and make changes to it.

Note... This article was written before the renaming of SkyDrive to OneDrive, hence the old name in the screenshots.

Today in the program

Share OneDrive files and folders

In OneDrive, file permissions are regulated at the folder and file level. When you make a folder public or grant permission to specific people to access it, these settings will also apply to all subfolders and files, unless you set them differently.

I uploaded the file to my personal folder and moved on to granting the rights to it to my colleagues.

In general, in the column “ General access"Is visible when the permissions on a file or folder are changed. Basically, Microsoft cloud storage has three options for granting access, and I'll start with the easiest ones.

Link to file

It is clear from the picture below that any link owner will be able to view or edit the document. It is less obvious that in order to make a folder or file public, you need to create an appropriate link (it is called "Share").

Of course, public access, as well as access via a link with editing rights, can be terminated at any time. Moreover, when you re-create the link for editing, the URL will have a different key.

Sending a mail message

This option is more interesting because it has the ability to require authorization with a Microsoft account. Moreover, this is the only option that allows you to grant access to the file only to certain people.

Your recipients will receive an email from the account with which you are logged into OneDrive (i.e. you cannot send an email from an arbitrary address). In this case, a link is also created, but the requirement to log in to the service restricts access to the file or folder to the recipients of the letter. Of course, the recipients of the letter can download and transfer the file to anyone in any other way.

Interestingly, in the case when several accounts are linked, permission is granted only to the account from which access was performed for the first time. By the way, when someone has shared a file with you, you can navigate to it from the General section in the left pane of OneDrive.

Access rights management

Artem participated in our correspondence, throwing good topics for reviews. However, he is not an MVP, so he did not need the rights to edit the file. Having sent the letter, I corrected the access rights, which are controlled in the right panel.

The figure shows that Artyom can only view the document, while everyone else can edit it in the local Word application or directly in OneDrive using Word Web App. Here you can also deny access to any person or all owners of the link to view or edit the file.

Collaborate on Office documents

Important! Open files from office programs directly from OneDrive (Ctrl + O → OneDrive), not from the synced folder to local disk... Otherwise, when several people work at the same time, a conflict will arise, the result of which will be copies of updated files with the name of the PC in the title.

You can open Word files, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote and work on them as in local applications Microsoft Office and in their web versions right in the browser. In both cases, supported joint work over a document of several people. The maximum number of concurrent editors is not spelled out anywhere, but eight people worked successfully (thanks for checking Oksana).

It works very conveniently in OneDrive! I opened our review in Word 2013 and started editing the first paragraph.

The paragraph was instantly locked to prevent someone else accidentally making overlapping changes to my snippet. Oksana, who was making her edits at the same time as me, saw this in the web application (she prefers the English interface).

Here I want to draw your attention to a few points.

1. It is clearly indicated which paragraph I am editing (my name is displayed on hover).
2. This paragraph is really protected from other people's edits. Now the cursor is positioned in it, and in the figure you can see that all formatting options are locked in the ribbon.
3. You can see a list of all the people currently editing.
4. It is known that someone has already changed the document, i.e. after the update, you can see their edits (there is no real-time synchronization, unfortunately).

In OneDrive, you can see who last edited a document.

But what's more interesting is that OneDrive automatically keeps track of document versions. You can navigate to the version history from context menu or from top menu"Control" (in the picture above it is hidden behind three dots due to the small size of the window).

Here you can restore or download any of the previous versions... As far as I know, up to 25 versions of a document are saved to OneDrive. However, versions are only created when the files are edited. If you upload a new file with the same name overwriting the old one, the version history will not be preserved.

Poll and discussion

As you can see, rights management in OneDrive is very simple, although some of the points are not entirely obvious. In this case, you can create and modify Word documents, Excel workbooks, PowerPoint presentations and OneNote notes without leaving your browser. Of course, the web versions of the Office apps do not have all the functionality of their counterparts from Office suite, but for many users their capabilities are more than enough.

You can work on Office files individually and collaboratively using at least 7GB of personal storage space. Oh yeah, it's all completely free;)

Do you store files and documents in the cloud? Share some of your favorite cloud storage features in the comments!

Very often there are situations when it is necessary to collect data from several people in one Excel file. If you all work in the same organization and you all have access to some network share, then there are no problems. But what if there is no such possibility, and there is no time for consistent filling? In this case, the SkyDrive cloud service will help us, which allows you to store documents on the cloud, work for several users at the same time in one document, delimit access to certain people, and much more.

How are we going to proceed? First, we'll create a template Excel file with a table to be filled out. Then we'll place the file on the SkyDrive cloud. And finally, we will send a link to the file by mail to all participants of the event and wait until everyone fills it out.

In our example, the table looks like this, where horizontally there are key indicators, and vertically - the districts to which we will send the table.

When the file is ready, it must be saved to the cloud, for this we click on the tab File, choose Save As -> Username in SkyDrive. Please note that in order to save on the cloud, you need to have an account Microsoft Live ID.

Now that our file is on the cloud, we can give change access, or read only. In the tab File choose Share -> Invite other people. We register the email addresses of all recipients, indicate the access level (read, change), add a couple of lines to our directive and click General access.

The recipients will receive approximately the following message with an attached link to the file. Please note that in order to open the file, the user does not need to have a copy of Excel installed on his computer, since by clicking on the link, your file will be opened using the Excel web client.

The Excel web client has a stripped-down functionality than the desktop one, but it does an excellent job of performing most of the day-to-day tasks.

Second - Post on social media, which makes it possible to post a link on the wall social network... We did not use this option in our example, since we needed to send the file to specific people, and in this case, the link will be posted on the Facebook wall, so all friends will be able to edit the file.

You can do all the same operations without having Excel installed on your computer, using a browser. It is enough to go to the SkyDrive website, where the above options are also available.

The world around us is changing. If earlier remote work seemed to be something completely exotic, but now it is already considered in the order of things: according to recent studies, it turned out that by 2020 one fifth of all Russians will work remotely. And, for example, in the United States, more than a third of all Americans are already working remotely. My remote work was usually associated with documents in MS Word format. (Well, occasionally - with presentation files.) text editor Since the old versions of Word (at least twenty years ago), there were the most convenient means of reviewing and co-editing documents, and in the document it was possible to save the entire history of changes made and you could always see which of the users made which changes. By the way, in my practice, the overwhelming majority of users (and even professional editors) have no idea that such tools exist in Word, and when they have to work together on documents, they do it the old fashioned way: they make corrections to the text live and write detailed comments in the notes. In the old days, when there were no cloud services, documents were sent via e-mail(or transferred on floppy disks) and it was not very convenient: some versions of files were lost in the process, new versions were replaced by old ones - and some of the fixes were lost. But over time, Microsoft has two very significant ones that make it much easier to collaborate on documents. And these innovations are as follows: the online version of the MS Office office suite, which allows you to work in familiar Word, Excel and Power Point from any computer with Internet access, and the OneDrive cloud service, with which you can easily organize the storage of documents that are being collaborated on. , directly on the Internet: in this case, users are no longer tied to specific computers at all and can have access to the necessary documents from anywhere. By the nature of my work as an editor-in-chief in several projects, I often have to explain in detail the scheme of joint remote work on documents to new authors, so I decided to outline all this in a separate article: it will be useful for new authors, and, quite possibly, someone from you, dear readers, will find it useful for himself. How is it all done? First you need to register in the cloud service OneDrive, which is useful for collaboration, and for archiving important data, and for remote access to your documents and media files. If you already have a Microsoft account, then you can sign in to OneDrive with this account, and if not, just create this account: for this you will need to specify some working e-mail to which you have access.
The principle of operation of the cloud service OneDrive is approximately the same as that of, for example, Dropbox: you have access to your personal storage on the Internet (on the OneDrive website) and this storage can be synchronized with the corresponding storage on your work computer, laptop, tablet, smartphone. To synchronize with the cloud, the corresponding OneDrive application is installed on a computer (laptop, tablet, smartphone), in which the synchronization settings are made.
Specify the folder where the OneDrive folders will be located, specify which of them should be synchronized, and that's it, then OneDrive will do everything on its own. OneDrive can also automatically send photos and videos that you make with your smartphone or tablet to the cloud. By default, it's free you are allocated 15 GB of space in the cloud, which is quite enough for photos and documents. However, if you are using an Office 365 plan (and I have been using it literally from the very first day of its appearance - this is very convenient), where for 286 rubles per month or 2874 rubles per year you are provided with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher and Access, and you can install them for five users on five computers, five tablets and five smartphones, then with this plan, 1 TB is allocated for each user in OneDrive, and you can shove an elephant there.

My OneDrive

However, the cloud capabilities of OneDrive are convenient and useful, but we are now interested in this service primarily from the point of view of organizing joint remote work. And here OneDrive, of course, significantly outperforms Dropbox, because it is for OneDrive that MS Office applications are well sharpened. And it works very, very simply. Look. For example, you have created an article in MS Word. You then need to send this article to the editor (boss, colleague) so that he can make comments there and edit the article. To do this, you need to save this article not in a local folder, but in the corresponding OneDrive folder. This is done literally in one click: in Word, when you save a document, simply select your OneDrive. (The first time you access, OneDrive will ask you for your account information - email and password.)

Well, then save your document, for example, in the "Office Live Documents" folder. Or create some other folder in OneDrive for this - as you like. OneDrive integrates with Windows, and the operating system works with its folders in the same way as with local folders on your computer.

Now what needs to be done? Give access to this document to your editor (boss, colleague). This is very easy to do. In Word, click File - General access... A window like this appears.

There, enter the address of the person (people) who should read and edit your article, and then click the "Share" button.

He will receive a corresponding notification by e-mail of something like this.

And in your document data, all the subscribers you invited will appear.

Then your subscriber just needs to click on the link - and he will have this article for reading in the online version of Word.
There is a link "Edit document": with this link, the document can be opened for editing in the online version or in MS Word.

It is more convenient, of course, to work with a document in Word, however, in the case when you are at someone else's computer, the online version can be a way out.

Article in the online editor

Whether or not to display these corrections on the screen is enabled in the corresponding menu.

The person who edits the document usually does not display all the corrections on the screen - it is inconvenient to edit this way. But when the author receives the document after editing, he turns on the "All corrections" mode - and perfectly in all the little things he sees what the editor did with his text: corrections, deletions, reformatting, and notes.

Screenshot is clickable

You can reply to notes, and you can always see who made which notes.

The author makes the required corrections, edits something there - and sends it back to the editor. He also clearly shows how the document has changed since the time of its last editing, and the changes and additions made by the author are shown in a different color - this is very clear. (In general, a color is chosen for each user's corrections.)

Screenshot is clickable

Moreover, it is enough to select the display mode "No corrections" - the article will be shown as it should look in its finished form.
Similarly, over a document (spreadsheet, presentation, database, schedule) dozens of different people can work. MS Office will carefully record all additions and changes, and there you can always roll back to some previous versions. Moreover, the system works quite normally in multi-user mode, that is, when several people are simultaneously working on a document. And you can always see who is currently working with you on this document.

Document editing options may be limited: for example, some users will only be allowed to add notes, others will be allowed read-only. You can also restrict the set of styles allowed for use.

By the way, in final document it is highly advisable to remove all change history and comments, especially if it is intended for use by some other people. It is quite simple to do this: you need to save the document under a new name and in the menu Peer review - Accept select "Accept all corrections and stop tracking" - then you will receive the final text (spreadsheet, presentation, and so on) without any unnecessary information.

Otherwise, I know of cases when users really regretted that they did not erase the entire history of changes in the document, and especially the comments. This is how the remote work of several people on one document is organized. As you can see, everything is very simple, easy and convenient. Microsoft account, using OneDrive, using online or offline versions of MS Office, tracking changes, various types of viewing changes. And your joint work on documents will be extremely convenient, and you can always track any steps to change the document. It seems that all these things are well-known, but oddly enough, I very often come across the fact that when, for example, I should be sent my article with some corrections, people send the document without tracking changes and I have to compare their text with mine in order to understand where and what they corrected. Yes, it's just some kind of wildness: what should they have turned on the tracking of changes - and then I would have seen everything instantly? !! So do not neglect such opportunities, they can save a lot of time and very effectively work together remotely on some files ...

This publication is of an explanatory nature and aims, as far as possible, in simple words and as lucidly as possible (as they ask, "for dummies"), explain the essence and mechanism of collaboration using resources cloud storage data such as, etc.

The cloud, technically speaking, is an online storage consisting of a large number servers united in a huge network (cloud data storage).

Cloud data storage should be understood as storing data in systems in which data is distributed over a large number of servers, united in so-called clusters.

Claster (English cluster - a cluster) - the union of several homogeneous elements, which can be considered as an independent unit with certain properties. In the sphere information technologies a cluster should be understood as a group of computational nodes united by high-speed communication channels, representing from the user's point of view a single hardware resource ().

Since the consumer does not know on which parts of the clusters his data is stored, and only the point of his connection with the array of clusters is known, such an implementation was called a "cloud". Cloud - cloud (eng.)

How is data exchange between users through the "cloud"?

Each user has account in the cloud and the client installed on the computer (data synchronization program). Synchronization is the process by which data stored in the cloud and data specified to the client to be mapped to the cloud is rendered identical.

For example, user-1 has 4 folders in the cloud,
and user-2 has 3 folders in the cloud
user-1 gives access to one of the folders to user-2 (blue). In cloud storage terminology, this is called an "invitation".
user-2 accepts the invitation to the folder and he also has 4 folders in the cloud. The folder received from user-1 is marked in orange.
As a result, we get a construction in which any change / addition of data in the blue folder will make exactly the same changes in the orange folder and vice versa (the folders are synchronized). That is, the contents of these folders will be identical.

Accordingly, these changes will also be transferred to computers user-1 and user-2 during the next session of their clients' connection with the cloud.

It turns out that after the synchronization is complete, the contents of the yellow folder owned by user-1 will become identical to the contents of the turquoise folder owned by user-2, and vice versa:

To put it simply, data is transferred from computer to computer. In this case, the cloud acts as an intermediary in this process.

Synchronization of client data with the cloud takes place over a secure protocol that prevents the interception of data over the network. Depending on the specific implementation, either a new file is transferred to replace the old one, or the "delta" value (the difference between the values ​​of the new and old files).

For its functioning, such a scheme does not require the completion of all synchronization operations during a communication session with the Internet. During the sync process, the client continually calculates the contents of the client folder and its corresponding cloud folder, and keeps track of the time stamp assigned to each file and each folder. Based on this information, the client writes or deletes data in the client or cloud folder, the time stamp of which is older (that is, earlier). If during a session with the Internet the synchronization process was not completed, then the next session it will be continued. This process can be conventionally called "data download". With this in mind, the term "asynchronous replication" can be associated with a process.

Replication is a mechanism for synchronizing the contents of multiple copies of an object (file, folder). In the process of replication, data is copied from one source to another (or to many others) and vice versa. In other words, changes made to one copy of an object are propagated to other copies.

With synchronous replication, if a given replica (a copy of an object that is updated automatically when the original is updated) is updated, all other replicas of the same piece of data must also be updated in the same transaction (transaction (from Latin transactio – agreement, contract) is a minimal logically meaningful operation that makes sense and can only be performed in full, see wiki). It can be said that in practice there is only one version of the data.

With asynchronous replication, updates from one replica propagate to others after some time, rather than during the same transaction. Thus, asynchronous replication introduces a delay (timeout) during which individual replicas may actually be non-identical (that is, the definition of "replica" is not entirely appropriate, since we are not dealing with accurate and timely copies). In most cases, asynchronous replication is implemented by reading the transaction log or a persistent queue of those updates that are to be propagated. ().

In the philosophical concept of spiral development, user-1 and user-2 exchange data through a common network folder(Shared folder) as it did before in local network... But if in that case, in order to carry out information exchange, user-1 and user-2 had to be located no further than 80 meters from each other (the maximum distance of information transmission, at which high-quality communication is guaranteed without the use of special amplifiers-repeaters), now their geographical location doesn't matter.