

Google adds collaboration support to Microsoft Office - hvasishth
http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2011/02/google-cloud-connect-for-microsoft.html

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gduffy
Congratulations DocVerse! What an awesome group of people.

For those who don't know them, Google acquired them last year presumably to
build exactly this.

From my experience, integrating with MS Office/Outlook APIs is no walk in the
park, so syncing with Docs is friggin' amazing.

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dayjah
Ahh, I was wondering what was powering that. Thought it might have been an
evolution of the etherpad stack.

Oh how I miss etherpad.

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CrazedGeek
_Many of you have also asked about availability for Macs. Unfortunately due to
the lack of support for open APIs on Microsoft Office for Mac, we are unable
to make Google Cloud Connect available on Macs at this time. We look forward
to when that time comes so we can provide this feature to our Mac customers as
well._

In case all you want is to access your documents as files:
<http://code.google.com/p/google-docs-fs/>

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makmanalp
Uh oh, app takeover. I don't know how Microsoft is going to react to Google
adding a crucially missing feature in Office and leveraging its software for
its own purposes.

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kenjackson
Maybe this will motivate them to get their rears in gear. The fact that
they've had SkyDrive and various sync/mesh technologies, yet haven't done this
is downright embarrassing.

I suspect MS thought they could do this in the enterprise via SharePoint
first. I think now they'll have to change their plans.

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contextfree
Er? I thought they already did add sync with SkyDrive and co-authoring (at
least in Word and Powerpoint) in 2010?

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kenjackson
They have syncing with SkyDrive. But no co-authoring that I know of. Link?

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contextfree
[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mvpawardprogram/archive/2010/12/20/m...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mvpawardprogram/archive/2010/12/20/mvps-
for-office-and-sharepoint-2010-work-without-the-wait.aspx)

"Microsoft Office 2010 enables technology known as co-authoring, which gives
you the ability to edit the same file at the same time as people in other
locations. No more waiting in line to get your work done, no more getting
locked out of your files, and more options for real-time collaboration with
your team. What applications enable co-authoring? You can use co-authoring in
the Office 2010 versions of Word and PowerPoint. Co-authoring via shared
notebooks is also available in Microsoft OneNote 2010. And, simultaneous
editing is also available in Microsoft Excel Web App and OneNote Web App."

Although it looks like there are kinda weird limitations on it, in that
apparently Word and PowerPoint co-authoring only work in the desktop apps (and
not in the web apps, but you have to save to SkyDrive), Excel co-authoring
only works in the web app (and not in the desktop app), and OneNote is the
only one that works in both the web app and desktop app.

~~~
kenjackson
Thanks. The UI for this is not very obvious. Had I known this with Word I
would have used it for a while now. I'll have to try it now.

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techjohn
How does this functionality compare to the upcoming Office 365?

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sebastianavina
I think dropbox it's not going to be acquired by google...

