Week The Fifth. Maps, mashups

I was initially confused by the tutorial instructions telling me to access 'My maps' in the Google Maps exercise, until I realised that it had been replaced by 'My places'. This was a really good reminder to always be ready and open to adapt to changes of terminology or changes to programs, which is seeming more and more like an inevitable situation I will be faced with.

To further explore and learn about mashups this week I decided to find an example of a mashup that would be relevant to me and also useful in an Information Management context. 

I found Doc2Cloud, which I think is hugely beneficial to me for my studies, and also for Information Management because of its multiple functions. 

Basically it allows the use of Cloud services - Google Docs, Box, Zoho and Dropbox - from within Microsoft Word, so you are not confined to one service. You can save your work in multiple 'clouds' for extra piece of mind if you want.

From inside Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint, you can open, edit and save cloud files. The cloud services talk to each other too - you can open a document from Dropbox and then save it to Google Docs. 

Also if you use Outlook Mail, you can save any attachments you get straight to the cloud.

This is an invaluable tool for both group and research assignments, as it saves time and effort with everything together in the same platform. In terms of utilising the full potential of different tools working together, I think this mashup is an excellent example. 

A drawback is that it only claims to be compatible with Office 2007 and 2010, so perhaps further development might see Mac users and other Office version users getting a look in.