When a group is set up, employees/students can share documents, spreadsheets, presentations, shared folders, sites, calendars, and videos with the group, rather than having to include individual email addresses or try to remember who joined or left a certain group.

Google cites the following Google Groups features that are now included:

- Fast set-up
- Searchable archives
- Sharing with a group
- Reply on behalf of a group
- IT capabilities

"After enabling the new service from the administrative control panel (add ‘user-managed groups’), users can start managing their own groups without burdening administrators for support," says Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager, Google Apps. "Administrators can still set group policies and manage other group settings."

Google says Google Groups will be rolling out to Google Apps Premier and Education Edition domains today, so there is a chance you won’t see it right away, but you should very soon.

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Searchers are being given the option of looking through either "all groups" or "Google Groups," with the first alternative selected by default.  A couple of Google Groups usually get shown at the top of results pages, and then the rest of the offerings kick in.

 

Instead of just a standard listing of blue links, the new Google Groups results pages give info about both the number of posts in a thread and the date on which the last post was made.  The results are good, too, tending to return answers from authoritative forums in our tests.

On the subject of advancements, Alex Chitu also notes, "It’s interesting to notice that Google’s help forums for different services are moving to a new platform initially created for a Yahoo Answers-like Q&A service.  Some of the forums have already migrated (Google Talk, Chrome, AdSense) and the benefits are clear: the new forums clearly delimit answers from questions, answered questions from unanswered questions and they encourage people to answer more questions."

Google may not be challenging Facebook and MySpace, but it’s definitely getting more social.

A theme in the article is that even the new Groups isn’t very web 2.0.

A free Traffick coffee mug to the person who can explain to me:

* What’s wrong with Groups, exactly, if it’s true that it isn’t web 2.0? Is there something vitally important that I need to do that I cannot do here?

* What makes it true to say it isn’t web 2.0? Is it even true?

* Can an app that includes a wiki-like feature, which this now does, really be accused of being “not web 2.0″? Is it because it isn’t a very good wiki, not a true wiki? (Which is fair to say – it isn’t.) So, can we give it a 1.7? The Google spokesman seems only prepared to give it 1.5, and it’s his baby. Is Basecamp somewhere below 2.0, then? Because some of its features aren’t very good. Maybe 1.85?

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Andrew Goodman is Principal of Page Zero Media, a marketing consultancy which focuses on maximizing clients’ paid search marketing campaigns.

In 1999 Andrew co-founded Traffick.com, an acclaimed “guide to portals” which foresaw the rise of trends such as paid search and semantic analysis.

Google Groups Spruces Up

There is web page creation, file sharing, and customization in Google Groups, and with apologies to Scott Karp and Steve Rubel, ‘social’ is very much a motivation to use the revised product.

Google has personalized the main Groups page for logged-in users. A box showing one’s group memberships and activity appears on the page. Its placement can be expanded to occupy the top of the screen or left in column form.

People can create personal profiles, which should be key to Google’s Groups strategy. They have emphasized the kinds of new features that keep people coming back. Every return visit presents Google with the opportunity to display its contextual advertising, making promotion of social aspects a given.

Software engineer Griff Hazen wrote at the Official Google blog how they introduced the new version of Groups last October in beta. Lots of feedback and new features later has seen them drop the ‘beta’ designation; for Google to move something out of beta in four months must be a land-speed record equivalent for a company that has been synonymous with lengthy beta periods.

Hazen’s rundown of the new features highlighted a change in the way people can read a Group’s messages. “For your discussions, there’s no need to struggle to follow interrupted conversations, as Google Groups now includes the same style of organization that Gmail users love,” he said.

Personal groups can be managed to permit levels of access. Content access can be publicly open or kept private. The group owner can assign viewing and editing permissions to individuals. It is similar to how their Docs & Spreadsheets product works.

File sharing has been enabled, with each group receiving 100 MB of storage for their items. For those who scored invites to the Google party at Davos, a Group would make a nice place for them to upload a few photos of the fun and share them with others (hint hint.)

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Maybe it is more remarkable that Google has learned to take a joke. The company’s wide variety of product releases have a lot of Beta labels, some of which have been in place for quite some time.

In discussing the new look and feel of Google Groups beta, Brett Lider a user experience designer for Google Groups, posted about the updated site and closed with a self-targeted zinger about the seemingly perpetual beta status of some products by saying, “we’re even trying to (gasp!) take it out of beta reasonably quickly.”

The initial launch of the Groups Beta is in English, but support for additional languages has been promised.

People can create individual groups and have access to a much cleaner design than the older version offered. Google’s focus with these changes is more people-focused than content-driven. Since both the old and new Groups carry the contextual ads that have made the company rich, that focus is to be expected.

New features added to groups with this beta include web page creation within the group. Lider wrote that many of the functions in Google Page Creator have been incorporated into the Groups Beta Pages feature.

Users can customize the appearance of groups they create. That includes colors, font styles, and logos for that group. Lider wrote that this was something users had been telling Google they wanted.

File sharing allows members of a group to upload their content for others to use. Each group has 100MB of storage space available to store the files they upload. The amount of space being used for storage will be displayed at the bottom of the Files page.

Part of the personal focus cited earlier comes from the Member Profiles people can create as members of a given group. Those profiles can include information about the member, and a photo if desired.

ZDNet’s Google blogger Garett Rogers commented on one aspect of the Groups Beta design. He found one issue to be a head-scratcher”

It looks like Google is using a convention, though, in keeping with its customary ad placement on the right side of a page, as they do in search results, Gmail inboxes, etc. Placing the navigation on the right gives users more area of the Groups Beta to play with as they customize their new groups. If navigation were on the left, that would limit the available space on the page by the width of the navigation elements.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.