I'm a grad student, and my whole class and I are going to do a term-long project where we divide into teams and gather data in the field; at the end of the term, we compile all the data we gathered and make a final presentation to city leaders and residents.
My first thought was, since groups in the past have encountered challenges with coordination and having materials available to everyone, that we could simply get a Google account, dump all our Docs, PDFs, Excels, etc. in Gmail and use Google Calendar to prioritize who has what assignment in the field. Furthermore, everyone in the group would have access to it, since staying on the same page is a high priority. However, the concern I have with Google is that it's not necessarily secure per se...you know how it has those ads on the side that read your emails and find similar ads. So to combat compromising our research, we might have to actively code all our work for security.
So my second thought went to MobileMe, since I think it's much more secure than Gmail, though of course at a price. The price isn't that big of an issue in my mind, since my class is quite large and it wouldn't cost much per person to chip in towards a common MobileMe account. My concerns with MobileMe, though, is it did get off to a rocky start in July, so I'm worried about stuff like uploading to iDisk, sending emails, setting calendars, etc. Can anyone tell me how their experience has been using MobileMe's iDisk, mail, calendars, etc? Is there any noticeable difference between using MobileMe's interface on a Mac and a PC? If you had to pick between Google and MobileMe for our purposes, which would you choose?
My first thought was, since groups in the past have encountered challenges with coordination and having materials available to everyone, that we could simply get a Google account, dump all our Docs, PDFs, Excels, etc. in Gmail and use Google Calendar to prioritize who has what assignment in the field. Furthermore, everyone in the group would have access to it, since staying on the same page is a high priority. However, the concern I have with Google is that it's not necessarily secure per se...you know how it has those ads on the side that read your emails and find similar ads. So to combat compromising our research, we might have to actively code all our work for security.
So my second thought went to MobileMe, since I think it's much more secure than Gmail, though of course at a price. The price isn't that big of an issue in my mind, since my class is quite large and it wouldn't cost much per person to chip in towards a common MobileMe account. My concerns with MobileMe, though, is it did get off to a rocky start in July, so I'm worried about stuff like uploading to iDisk, sending emails, setting calendars, etc. Can anyone tell me how their experience has been using MobileMe's iDisk, mail, calendars, etc? Is there any noticeable difference between using MobileMe's interface on a Mac and a PC? If you had to pick between Google and MobileMe for our purposes, which would you choose?