October 11, 2006

Today Google launched its Docs and Spreadsheets at http://docs.google.com. Google's new service integrates the previously separate Writely and Spreadsheet services into just one control panel and admin area.

Note that the previous two sites for those services redirect to http://docs.google.com. Google's new combo service shows all of a user’s Writely and spreadsheet documents all in a single list.

However, overall integration dosen't go any further than this at this point in time. The two interfaces and their various features have been mirrored in an effort to provide a consistent user experience.

For example, Private Messaging (previously only available on the old spreadsheet product) is now available when working on a Docs (Writely) document as well. Brillant by its absence is the ability to easily embed spreadsheets directly into Writely documents, a feature already offered by Zoho.

Zoho has been rapidly updating its own office suite, while Google still tells us this feature will be coming soon.

Overall, Google is rather straightforward in its goal at improving collaboration and sharing of newly-created documents, while agreeing that desktop office applications will continue to offer superior editing features.

No matter how you look at it, the ability to import and collaborate on any given document, and then to be able to publish it to the Internet or take it back to your own desktop is a very powerful feature not available to Microsoft Office users outside of Office Live or Microsoft Sharepoint Portal Server.

What's more, use of Google’s online office applications are free. However, an important disadvantage of online office applications is the fact that potentially sensitive documents are uniquely stored on Google’s servers.

The fact that an internal Google document about their very own Pet Project “Platypus” was discovered on Writely earlier in 2006 only underscores these main concerns. Google still tells us that this was not a security breach, however! Google notes that specific individuals and small and medium-sized businesses aren’t too concerned...

For now, Google’s security precautions are probably far beyond what they are doing anyway. Questions about Google’s plans to further expand its online office offerings went unanswered today.

As a matter of fact, Google doesn’t even like to use the word “Office”. But clearly Google intends to keep listening closely to its users and launching the new products that they need.

If their recent changes at Google Reader are any indication of their tenacity, Google’s Office offerings will keep getting better over time.

Source: Tech Crunch