Thursday 10 January 2013

Google Docs: the clipboard-sharing tool in the cloud

Today I was asked to support a customer with some urgent issues. To be able to help them quickly I was given access via a VMware View Client (a Citrix alike online desktopsharing solution from VMware).
From that desktop I connected to an internal desktop with a Remote Desktop session, since there were all the necessary tools, like Notepad++, jDeveloper, SoapUI, etc, installed. In the end I neede another RDP session to the server on which SoaSuite was running.

Anyway, during the analasis I kept a report document in Google Docs. At one point I needed to write an email in which I wanted to share some information from logs on the remote desktop. Now I could connect to gmail. But I was already writing the email in Thunderbird on my laptop. Since there were so may layers of RDP-in-RDP sessions, I could not copy and paste from the logs to my laptop anymore.

Then the team-cooperation functionality from Google Docs come in handy! I opened the same document again on my laptop and Google Docs neatly synchronized both sessions. So anything I wrote and copied-and-pasted into the document in the RDP session became visible on my laptop and vice-versa. Now, I know: it's not new, but it enabled me to copy-and-paste from the document into my email.

So, Google Docs turned out the perfect clipboard sharing tool. I found it a nice trick to share.

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