Collaboration in the Cloud at Google

Yunting Sun Diane Lambert Makoto Uchida

Google Inc. Google Inc. Google Inc.
111 8th Ave 111 8th Ave 1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy
New York, NY 10011 New York, NY 10011 Mountain View, CA 94043
ytsun@google.com dlambert@google.com muchida@google.com

Nicolas Remy
Google Inc.
8 Rue de Londres
75009 Paris, France
nicolasremy@google.com

1. INTRODUCTION
Google Docs is a cloud productivity suite and it is de-
signed to make computer-mediated collaboration easy and
natural so that users can access any document they own or
that has been shared with them anywhere, any time and on
any device. The question is whether this enriched model of
computer-mediated collaboration matters.
There have been many analyses of the effect of email, mes-
saging and video conferencing on collaboration. For exam-
ple, [3] studied what mix of video and audio is useful for
small groups doing remote real-time design work. [1] stud-
ied a spatially distributed product design team and showed
that mobility enhances informal interactions and awareness.
Collaboration software is relatively new compared to email,
messaging and video conferencing and quantitative studies
are few. Blau and Caspi [2] ran a small experiment that was
designed to compare collaboration on writing documents to Figure 1: Collaboration activity on a design docu-
merely sharing documents. The authors found that only ment. The X axis is time in hours and the Y axis is
students in the collaboration group perceived the quality of the number of users for each action type. The docu-
their final document to be higher after receiving feedback, ment was mainly edited by 3 employees, commented
and students in all groups thought that collaboration im- on by 18 and viewed by 50+.
proves documents.
This study looks for the effects of collaboration on a large, Figure 1 shows the life of a design document created by
diverse organization with thousands of users over a much engineers. The vertical axis is broken into three regions rep-
longer period of time. The first part of the study visualizes resenting viewing, editing and commenting. Each contribu-
how Google Docs is used for collaboration, and the second tor is assigned a color. A box with the contributor’s color
part analyzes how collaboration has evolved over the last two is drawn in any time interval in which the contributor was
years. The full paper can be found at http://research. active, at a vertical position that indicates what the user
google.com/pubs/archive/41895.pdf was doing in that time interval. The X axis is time in hours
and the Y axis is the number of employees working on the
document for each action type. Only time intervals in which
2. COLLABORATION VISUALIZATION at least one contributor was active are shown, and gaps in
This section introduces ways to visualize collaboration time that are shorter than 12 hours are ignored. Gray ver-
based on the view, edit and comment actions of all full- tical bars of fixed width are used to represent periods of no
time employees on tens of thousands of documents created activity that are longer than the threshold. The document
in April 2013. was mainly edited by three employees, commented on by 18
employees and viewed by more than 50 employees from three
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or major locations. This document was completed within two
classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed weeks and viewed many times in the subsequent month.
for profit or commercial advantage, and that copies bear this notice and the full ci- Employees use the Docs suite to collaborate with col-
tation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be leagues across the world. Figure 2 shows one month of
honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). Copyright is held by the
global collaborations for full-time employees using Google
author/owner(s).
WebSci’14, June 23–26, 2014, Bloomington, IN, USA.
Docs. The blue dots show the locations of the employees
ACM http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2615569.2615637. and a line connects two locations if a document is created in

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 Figure 2: Global collaboration on Docs.
Figure 3: The average number of active users work-
ing in Google Docs in each day of week and time of
day slot. The X axis is day of the week and the Y
axis is time of the day in local time.
one location and viewed in the other. The warmer the color
of the line, moving from green to red, the more documents
shared between the two locations.
The advantage of cloud-based software and storage is that
a document can be accessed from any device. Not surpris-
ingly, the pattern of working on desktops or laptops during
working hours and on mobile devices out of business hours
holds generally at Google, as Figure 3 shows. Each pixel is
colored according to the average number of employees work-
ing in Google Docs in a day of week and time of day slot,
with brighter colors representing higher numbers. Pixel val-
ues are normalized within each plot separately.
3. THE EVOLUTION OF COLLABORATION
This section explores changes in the usage of Google Docs
over time for new employees. We call two employees col-
laborators (or subscription collaborators to be clear) if one
is a subscriber to a document owned by the other and has
viewed the document at least once and the document has
fewer than 20 subscribers. The owner of the document is
said to have shared the document with the subscriber.
Here we define the new employees for a given month to be
all the employees who joined Google no more than 90 days
before the beginning of the month and started using Google
Docs in the given month. Each month includes different
employees. New employees are said to share a document
if they own a document that someone else subscribed to,
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Figure 4: This figure shows the percentage of new
employees who share, subscribe to others’ docu-
ments and either share or subscribe in each one-
month period over the last two years.
whether or not the person subscribed to the document is
a new employee. Similarly, a new employee is counted as a
subscriber, regardless of the tenure of the document creator.
Figure 4 shows that collaboration among new employees
each month has increased since 2011. Over the last two
years, subscribing has risen from 55% to 85%, sharing has
risen from 30% to 50%, and the fraction of users who ei-
ther share or subscribe has risen from 70% to 90%. In other
words, new employees are collaborating earlier in their ca-
reer, so there is a faster ramp-up and easier access to collec-
tive knowledge.
4. CONCLUSION
We have developed a visualization technique for the re-
vision history of a document and analyzed key features in
Docs such as collaborative editing, access from anywhere
and on any device. Although we don’t have survey results
like those in [2], we find that new employees are becoming
more engaged in using the Docs suite, which suggests that
Docs suite is helping new employees ramp up and collabo-
rate.
5. REFERENCES
[1] V. Bellotti and S. Bly. Walking away from the desktop
computer: distributed collaboration and mobility in a
product design team. Proceeding of the ACM conference
on Computer supported cooperative work, pages
209–218, 1996.
[2] I. Blau and A. Caspi. What type of collaboration
helps? psychological ownership, perceived learning and
outcome quality of collaboration using google docs.
Learning in the technological era: Proceedings of the
Chais conference on instructional technologies research,
pages 48–55, 2009.
[3] J. Olson, G. Olson, and D. Meader. What mix of video
adn audio is useful for small groups doing remote
real-time design work. Proceedings of the SIGCHI
conference on Human factors in computing systems,
pages 362–368, 1995.