Google is bringing the cloud to office productivity tools — Microsoft’s Office tools, that is. On Thursday, the search giant announced that it’s releasing Google Cloud Connect for Office, which was initially shown as a preview last fall.
The company said that, with a free plug-in, Cloud Connect for Office “brings collaborative multi-person editing to the family Microsoft Office experience.” It enables users to share, backup and simultaneously edit Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents.
‘Smart Synchronization’
No SharePoint deployment is required, and Connect supports Office 2003, 2007 and 2010 on Windows PCs. Office 2010 offers collaboration, but Google Connect gives that capability to earlier releases of the popular productivity suite. Google noted that, “due to the lack of support for open APIs on Microsoft Office for Mac,” Connect is not currently available for that platform.
Office files are synced via the cloud and given a unique URL. Once they are synced, files are automatically backed up. Files can be worked on from connected mobile devices as well as desktop or laptop computers.
When documents are shared, participants get a notification e-mail. Shared documents get downloaded from the cloud and edited in the app normally. When working offline, changes are synced to all participants the next time they log in. If two or more participants edit the same section simultaneously, Cloud Connect for Office provides paths for choosing which edits to keep.
Editing is simultaneous, with no document or paragraph locking while one person is working. Each Office file has a URL that is shared in Google Docs, and Docs retains a version history. Documents can be edited offline, and can be brought up to speed with online docs via “smart synchronization.”
DocVerse Technology
A potentially big advantage of the plug-in approach is that, instead of importing and exporting Office docs to Google Docs, which…