23 Musings

Or at least it will be soon...

For ages I've been waiting for some offline functionality to arrive for Google Docs to allow me to work offline on spreadsheets and documents and then work online on them later, keeping them synchronised. I've been expecting this to arrive from Google in the form of a Gears application but it seems like everyone is dying to beat them to the launch.

Docsyncer is in private beta at the moment and promises full on/offline synchronisation between your Microsoft Office documents and Google Docs. Docsyncer will run quietly in the background on your PC and upload (and download) any changes made to documents in either environment (desktop or online).

This is fantastic news! I can't wait to try it, being an avid user of Google Docs this will aid my productivity hugely! How long Docsyncer will remain an independent company and not just another part of Google is anyones guess...

Interesting one this... A friend just sent me this url which takes you to a new service from Google called Shared Stuff. At first glance it looks like a Delicious'esque social bookmarking tool, in fact that's exactly what it looks like.

Shared Stuff is really easy to use. Drag an 'email/share' button to your browser toolbar and start clicking when on a page you want to share. Links can include images and text extracts and also comments. You can view the resulting page directly or RSS it or even iGoogle it. You can also cross post from Shared Stuff to services such as Delicious, Furl or Facebook. You can invite people to view your Shared Stuff by email and Gmail contacts can view too.

Now why would Google go to the trouble of creating a 'me too' app (something they're not that known for?

Now, think a bit deeper about this tool and how it could relate to other Google apps and services. Shared docs, spreadsheets, email, web searches, Google gadgets, links, news etc etc. Clearer? Makes sense to me, this could (potentially) become the way users really collaborate and share not just bookmarks (as this looks now) but also all other Google services. It's all very well integrated and could become a real hub for collaboration (if they've thought of that). Of course it could just be Google bookmarks Mk2...

I blogged back in June about Google's ambitions to add a presentation app to Docs & Spreadsheets. They purchased Zenter who made an online Powerpoint clone and discussed the future of Docs & Spreadsheets at conferences. Now they've announced the launch of the third office app in their stable.

It's quite a basic presentation tool at present, I'm sure with much richer functionality to come in the future. The great thing is that as with all their apps you can collaborate on the creation of new slide shows and when it's time to present users can connect through Google Talk to watch and chat about the presentation.

Powerful stuff! Still waiting on the true offline capabilities though...

Zoho, those creators of funky web based office apps, will be announcing offline functionality for Zoho Writer their word processor tool today. This may be the first on/offline office app of it's type.

The functionality has been built with Google Gears. That's a huge smack in the face for Google as they should have been first with this kind of offline functionality for their own Google Docs, not letting a competitor use their own technology to beat them to it. Users will need to install a plugin to allow the offline functionality, but that's it, really simple.

Read-only functionality is coming first for the offline users. Read/write will be added in a number of weeks and thats the killer app.

Zoho are constantly one step ahead of Google and other online office tool providers. Google et al need to step up a gear and launch some serious innovation if they are to catch up (functionality wise that is).

Here's a video presentation about the functionality:

Google are doing really well with their push to get universities to sign up to their free Google Apps Education Edition.

The latest news is that the universities of North Carolina Greensboro, Clemson, Texas San Antonio, Kennesaw State and Arkansas State have signed up for the free service, which comprises of email, messaging, online calendars, word processing, and spreadsheets.

They join other universities like the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Trinity College in Dublin and Nihon University in Tokyo, who already use Google's applications.

This really is one in the eye for Microsoft. Supplying universities with software has been a lucrative flow of money for Microsoft for years, if Google keep eating away at this Microsoft will notice the drop in profits!

Interesting news out today that Adobe may be considering jumping into the office productivity market in the future. Now that they have the Adobe AIR runtime platform they have a perfect framework for creating desktop apps that have online connectivity. That would seem a natural framework for creating an on/offline synchronising suite of office tools.

Adobe AIR is a fascinating product as it gives you all the power and potential of the internet right on your desktop. Maybe Google will buy Adobe and port it's Apps, Docs and Gmail onto the AIR platform (as I blogged about yesterday)?

Rumours abound once again of Google's ambitions in the browser market. Apparently they've registered Gbrowser.com as a domain name and various blog posts online and discussing the benefits they could derive from entering this competitive market.

Google already have a small investment in Maxthon, a browser popular in the Chinese market. Whether this could be the base of a push into producing a browser remains to be seen.

Of course, Gbrowser.com could be something entirely different. It could be an attempt to secure the domain name for other possible uses, one of which I'd suggest could be an offline browser (more like an Explorer than a traditional browser) to access Google Apps, Docs, Gmail etc when full on/offline functionality is launched which must be coming sometime soon (you'd imagine). It would add a lot of value if you could download all those Google services to your hard disk for browsing and ammending before reconnecting to upload changes. That would really make Google a desktop app and fully portable!

Google is buying Postini, a company who offer companies services to protect and control their email for $625M in cash.

This is the first move by Google to offer services to corporates. This is interesting as I've always hoped Google would move Apps into a corporate service space as well as the consumer space it currently occupies.

Apps has massive potential to be taken up by corporates everywhere and if they can offer some sort of security feature that is going to help corporates be persuaded to sign up!

Great to hear that Google have rolled out new features for it's Google Docs application! The latest additions are (as always) eminently useful to the average user (like me) and to businesses who may choose to use the whole Google Apps suite.

The document list has been given a new look, new icons, more content and better control to organise your documents.

Folders have been added! This is a huge bonus for users, and makes organisation of your documentation a whole lot easier. The folders continue to work like the previous tags as well so all the old tags are transformed into folders. This is brilliant, it looks more professional and is much simpler to see the organisation this way. I really hope they do the same for Gmail, as much as i like the ability to label/tag messages, you can't beat folders for being properly organised.

Search ahead, once you start searching for a document, the list will filter based on what you've typed so far. Another useful feature that can save time as you don't always need to type everything now.

They've also launched the ability to integrate with Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Websters dictionary and thesaurus.

This is all great and takes Google Docs another step ahead of the competition in my opinion! Still waiting for full Google Gears offline capability, but I'm sure that's coming soon!

Google have announced a mail merge feature for Google Apps. This will allow any businesses with IMAP to move their mail to Gmail easily. The emails will be automatically threaded into conversations and made searchable.

This is a huge bonus for small businesses who may be wanting to move to a cheaper, more portable email solution.

Google do need to do something to guarantee reliability and data integrity though. If they can show some kind of guarantee that your email is safe I have no doubt that people in their droves will move over!

There seems to be a monthly announcement on the Google Blog about the acquisition of another office 2.0 start-up. This time around Google have announced the purchase of Zenter, a company that provides software for creating online slide presentations.

So further to my news about the Powerpoint viewer in Gmail and the reports of Google presentation ambitions, it seems Google are all set to build a web based presentation tool which will be firmly integrated into their online office system Google Apps.

It's a winner for the Y Combinator fund as well because they funded Zenter in the early days, more on this aspect at Techcrunch.