We were about to write the obligatory “check out the new feature in our app” blog post when we saw something on TechCrunch that does a much better job of illustrating what we want to convey.
It seems that last night an anonymous source at MySpace let TechCrunch in on a little secret. MySpace uses Google Docs, and they have an internal spreadsheet with all of their traffic and engagement analytics by brand……
….and it was publicly accessible. And TechCrunch posted the link so anyone could read and download the document. From the TechCrunch post:
The document shows MySpace traffic from August 1 to September 30, 2010. It’s broken down by property (MySpace.com, photos, mobile, music, etc.), age and sex. You can see, for example, that on September 28, 284,579 people between 18-24 viewed their “Account Settings” page.
I downloaded the spreadsheet in the very likely event public access is removed once MySpace discovers the “private” setting. Or they just put it, you know, on their own servers.
Here’s a screenshot of the doc, posted on TechCrunch:
With that said, this might be a good time to announce a new feature in our app, CloudLock For Google Docs. For the uninitiated, CloudLock For Google Docs is a Google Apps Marketplace add-on that’s all about giving admins visibility and control to find information that is exposed outside and inside their company and lets them secure and audit those documents.
And now there’s one more thing: they can fix the permissions on those documents right from the app.
In the first release, admins could generate a list of exposed Google Docs, but could not fix them directly. Instead, they had to notify the owner of the doc that the permissions needed to be changed.
With our new release Google Apps admins can now change the sharing permissions of any document in their domain, safely remove any collaborators that they don’t want or need and can, in general secure their Google Docs like never before. Admins are now able to fix cases of public document exposure, documents that can be accessed by anyone on the internet, as well as cases where documents where shared outside of the domain with the wrong people. We have also made sure that any change to access rights will be fully audited to make sure the organization can track and supervise any and all privileged user actions.
This new ability to fix access right is a big step we are taking to ensure cloud based solutions, specifically Google Docs, can offer the same level of control as on premise file systems.
Free 7 day trials of CloudLock For Google Docs are available on the Google Apps Marketplace. Try it today, and maybe you can avoid being on the front page of TechCrunch……for the wrong reasons.
CloudLock For Google Apps helps Google Apps administrators secure access to their Google Docs and Sites. 7 day free trials are available on the Google Apps Marketplace.
