Google teaches old docs new tricks

Anil Sabharwal, Google's Head of Product Management for Apps, says there has been a 'tectonic' shift towards cloud computing and businesses see collaborative development as a necessity. Source: The Australian

GOOGLE today has showcased a plug-in that will let Microsoft Office users transfer documents to the cloud, and share and edit them in real-time with other Office users.

With the ‘Cloud Connect’ plug-in installed, users of Microsoft Office 2003, 2007 and 2010 can directly share existing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents by uploading them to Google Docs.

Other users can then access the shared versions and all can collaboratively edit them in Microsoft Office using real-time technology similar to that showcased in the technically innovative, but commercially unsuccessful Google Wave.

Google demonstrated in Sydney today sentences typed in a Word document by one collaborator becoming immediately visible in the same document co-edited by another.

The Wall Street Journal today reported that Google planned to formally introduce the new tool later this week after releasing it to early testers in November.

Smart phone users with the Google Docs app installed also can work collaboratively with colleagues using PCs, and chat to each another while co-editing documents.

Google started its media conference today with a PowerPoint presentation of 400 slides which had been collaboratively worked on by 350 people.

In Sydney today, Anil Sabharwal ,Google’s Head of Product Management for Apps in Australia and New Zealand, said the online giant recognised the ‘tectonic shift’ in information technology from the desktop to the “webtop” by consumers, and the increasing demand by enterprises for lower cost, ease of use, speed, scalability and security in computing.

“Ten years ago we probably worked much more in a solo environment, we would work in our computing environments, we would write a document, put together a presentation, we would do a spreadsheet, we might go to a meeting now and then, but then we’d come back and do our own individual work,” Mr Sabharwal said.

“What we’re seeing now .. is that organisations that actually can work in a  more collaborative environment are more productive and get things done better and faster.”

Google’s plug-in directly takes on Microsoft which last year introduced collaboration in the form of SharePoint in Office 2010. Cloud Connect works with older Office versions, but not with Mac OS.

Google Docs now includes built-in optical character recognition (OCR) that can automatically convert uploaded PDF and scanned content into text. Another initiative is in-built document translation of uploaded documents. Currently Google Docs supports Latin-character based languages.

Mr Sabharwal said that next week Google would announce the extension of Google Docs translation to Chinese Simplified, Korean, Japanese, Thai, and other European languages. The development work for this had taken place in Sydney.

As a security measure, Google this month released a mobile device app that provides enterprise users with a real-time security code, similar to that provided by an RSA token. Enterprise users can opt for two-factor authentication before accessing their documents in the cloud.

The offering of collaborative tools in Google Docs is expected to make more commercial sense than collaboration in Wave, which promised to merge social networks, email, messages and wikis into one online stream – but was hit by user nervousness and privacy concerns.

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