Assignment 1 ggaikwa.doc

IT 497 Assignment 1, Fall 14
ggaikwa


Group A
Google Drive

Google drive is a very sophisticated tool by Google.Inc which is a cloud storage application  which provides many features for free to personal usage. This provides services from file sharing, cloud storing, easy synchronization and one of the most exclusive feature as collaborative editing of documents. Also Google drive currently is home for Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides and Office Suite over which it provides collaborative editing, these service APIs will later be separated down the line to grow even more.

For individual assignments or projects Drive will be a very convenient option to search, save and work from anywhere you want and on any device you want from mac, windows, android, iOS or if not you can easily access your Drive from any browser. Google extensions makes it very easy to do most of the thing you want to do on web. Save to extension will allow you to save nearly anything from web onto your Drive.

On contrary for group assignments or projects Drive will be a very collaborative tool where you can review and manage revisions of a single file, synchronised collaboration on Google Docs, spreadsheet and presentation allow you and your group members to work on a single file at a single time making it very easy and flexible to view who is doing what and avoid revisions and work merging issues later. Also one can search files with filters like visibility, ownership, last saved and more making it easy for a group to work together reducing redundancy.

For programming courses Drive’s revision management will be a very important feature. Also you can customize Google Apps Scripts in JavaScript to personalize or automate or trigger your calendar, events, forms, stats, emails, or drive documents. Drive’s API can easily create a authentication for any application a developer want’s to include on Google Developers Console on Android, iOS, client side or server side authentication. Developer can also gets a marketing tool for application either on Play Store or CHrome Web Store. Developer Applications can also get advantage of Drive Web API to use all features of Drive being integrated.

Non-programming courses gets an advantage of many features from Google such as working offline which means you can even work while traveling, Drive over chrome provides functionality to work even where you can’t install third party applications. Moreover you can search any file either from Gmail as well. 


Group B
GitHub

GitHub can manage course assignment making it collaborative and easily accessible to everyone.

Individual assignment will not be getting much from it but group assignments will definitely gets an assist from Git’s Version Control feature where everyone creates their own versions at every save point and then later members can merge their work.

GitHub is the largest programmer community which gives developers features to easily collaborate, branch off, control versions, commit or restore. Programmers can build public or local repositories under a project and share projects publically so that any other programmer can reuse the code. But on the contrary Git won’t help much in non-programming courses as these features won’t be needed much extensively.