I’m excited to preview the integration we’ve been working on at rSmart between Sakai and Google Docs. We expect to release this integration in the upcoming 2.7.1 version of our rSmart Sakai CLE distribution, and once we see it in action, contribute the integration to the broader Sakai community. Embedded here is a 7.5 minute demo of the integration that covers the basic functionality. I’ve also attached an early case study rSmart produced in collaboration with Google on this functionality.
What makes this integration so cool is now Sakai users can harness the rich authoring and collaboration capabilities of Google Docs, and use Sakai to distribute their documents to other Sakai users, like students, classmates, or other collaborators. The integraton works with your personal Google user account, or if your institution uses Google Apps, your institutional Google identity.
This is a stellar example of all the new integrations we’re seeing with the Sakai platform. Look to try out the integration yourself soon on rSmart’s mySakai environment, where we’ll turn it on once our 2.7.1 version is released.
Nate, this is really cool stuff! Are you looking at doing this integration with Sakai3?
Jim:
It’s too early to tell what may happen around this in Sakai 3. One issue is that Sakai 3’s native document authoring and collaboration capabilities have a lot more overlap with Google Docs than Sakai 2’s, so there’s some duplication there.
Given what I know about Sakai 3’s technical architecture tho, integrations like this should be easier, not harder.
– Nate
This is a great feature. Would it make sense to integrate other Google Apps functionality with Sakai? For example, besides having Sakai course, projet, etc. sites, we could offer Google Sites.
— Thomas Amsler
Thomas:
Interesting idea with Google Sites. I’m thinking it might not be that crazy to be able to make Google Sites available to locate in Sakai’s Resources tool much like Google Docs are here, but I think it would be something else to try to make Google Sites available as a site type inside Sakai, or to access Sakai widgets/data from Google Sites. The latter would certainly be possible with existing Sakai 2 webservices, and right in the heart of the “unSakai” capabilities of Sakai 3.
– Nate