It was announced Sunday that The Goog bought DocVerse, and the blogosphere is rumbling again about "the Microsoft challenger," "the desperate competition" and similar drivel. If I sound jaded, I'll plead guilty; I've been me sidelined from life with health issues and my attention has been almost exclusively Google's since about mid-February.
This acquisition is significant for a couple of reasons.
DocVerse is a package of plug-ins which a user installs on his or her personal computer, associated with the Microsoft Office applications. When a .XLS, .PPT or .DOC file is created or opened, the user can share the file with other people they identify; the file is synchronized to a web-based version stored in a web cloud. When a change is made to the local copy and saved, the changes update the cloud copy. A group of people can work in one file simultaneously; comments, changes and change history are rippled out from the cloud server as each user saves their changes.
Users can start to work online on current common tasks, such as preparing status reports requiring multiple inputs. As an early threshold of usability is achieved, use of cloud collaboration will grow. Work-process folks will begin to look at when a team member participates in a workflow as a new focus for optimization; work flow analyses will document improvements on how tasks may be done, improving overall data quality and time to completion.
Once teams of users work collaboratively with Office documents, the concept of an e-mail program with similar functionality will seem natural. The impression of inviting users to collaborate on a document and interact through the document to it's completion, will gel in the user's mind and probably change how we look at e-mail going forward.
This acquisition is significant for a couple of reasons.
First, DocVerse will give Office users who produce content in teams (locally or in networked environments) a way to move toward a 'Cloud Collaboration' work model. This puts Google first in a space which Microsoft stated would be their major objective for 2010.
Second, the DocVerse tools give people a practical means of visualizing what Google Wave - a possible future standard of e-mail - is all about.
DocVerse is a package of plug-ins which a user installs on his or her personal computer, associated with the Microsoft Office applications. When a .XLS, .PPT or .DOC file is created or opened, the user can share the file with other people they identify; the file is synchronized to a web-based version stored in a web cloud. When a change is made to the local copy and saved, the changes update the cloud copy. A group of people can work in one file simultaneously; comments, changes and change history are rippled out from the cloud server as each user saves their changes.
Users can start to work online on current common tasks, such as preparing status reports requiring multiple inputs. As an early threshold of usability is achieved, use of cloud collaboration will grow. Work-process folks will begin to look at when a team member participates in a workflow as a new focus for optimization; work flow analyses will document improvements on how tasks may be done, improving overall data quality and time to completion.
Once teams of users work collaboratively with Office documents, the concept of an e-mail program with similar functionality will seem natural. The impression of inviting users to collaborate on a document and interact through the document to it's completion, will gel in the user's mind and probably change how we look at e-mail going forward.
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