24 April 2010

Docs.com BETA : Microsoft Office Documents Online Storage, Discovery, Sharing And Collaboration For Facebook

Docs.com Logo

During the f8 conference Facebook announced a little partnership with Microsoft for the unveil of Docs.com.

Docs.com unlike what most of the big blogs are reporting, is not meant to be taken as the direct way Microsoft is going to compete with Google, Zoho and Adobe on the Online Office Suite model.

This new offering first goal is to partly replace Office Live Workplace and it’s second goal is to offer a Microsoft version of what the likes of DocStoc, Scribd, Adobe Share and finally Zoho Docs already offer: A Digital Documents online portal.

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So the startups most alluded by this new offering will be DocStoc and Scribd as this could compete directly to the core of what they do. The interesting spin on Docs.com is that it right now only connects with Facebook. So you can only share your documents and collaborate in them with your Facebook contacts at this moment.

A final important thought about Docs.com is that it is being put as a Microsoft FUSE Labs offering.

This fact in particular means that it is a experimental product that is meant to change and comes without a guarantee of actual release. The way i see it, the idea is sound as many other similar startups have already proved in the Digital Documents biz. The only thing it needs is for it to have connection with LinkedIn and Windows Live to make it the best option for Office Documents because you may not want to keep the documents social at all or because you want to share and collaborate with your business contacts from LinkedIn instead of Facebook

Docs.com BETA is certainly a great way for you to store, share and collaborate with your Office Documents in Facebook. The only thing to wait is for Office Web to be launched so it can be really used appropriately and a thing left to be seen is how/if Microsoft plans to integrate it with SkyDrive, Windows Live,  Office Web and other possible Social Networks like the mentioned LinkedIn or just leave it as a Facebook only product. Something that i don’t think would make much sense, but you never know.

Linkage

Docs.com

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