Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Google’s New Cloud Connect Targets Microsoft Office

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Google is ready to show off what its plans are for DocVerse, the startup
it bought back in March. DocVerse had built a cloud-based add-on for
Microsoft Office
designed to let users easily share and edit Office
documents online.

Starting Monday, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) plans to offer the revamped
DocVerse (renamed Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office) to testers.
The company had no details about when Cloud Connect would be more widely
available, but did confirm the service will be free.

DocVerse was started by two former Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) product
managers. Basically, the service is designed to help users of Office
Word, Powerpoint and Excel move to Google Docs by giving them the same
Office interface with the added collaborative features that Docs offers.

Google said Office 2003, 2007 and 2010 users can use Cloud Connect to
sync their Office documents to the Google cloud, without ever leaving
Office.

“Once synced, documents are backed-up, given a unique URL, and can be
accessed from anywhere (including mobile devices) at any time through
Google Docs. And because the files are stored in the cloud, people
always have access to the current version,” DocVerse co-founder and
current Google group product manager, Shan Sinha, said in a blog post.

The documents in Google’s cloud can be shared and edited simultaneously
by multiple people from within Office. Sinha said the service also keeps
a full revision history as the files are edited, and users can revert to
earlier versions in one click — a standard feature of Google Docs.

Those interested in signing up for to test Cloud Connect can find the sign-up page here.

For everyone else, “don’t worry,” said Sinha. At launch, Google Cloud
Connect will be available free to everyone, including consumers.”

The release of Cloud Connect comes at a time when Google has been moving
aggressively to try and win a bigger slice of the enterprise
productivity applications market long dominated by Microsoft.

Recently, Google relented on a long-standing request by many users to
offer, as an option, a more traditional, chronological view of email
messages in Gmail
. Google’s standard “conversation view” collapses
email “threads” or exchanges into one message.

David Needle is the West Coast bureau chief at InternetNews.com, the news
service of

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