Hi, I’m Matt Augustine, one of the developers on the team building Docs. We’re psyched about this opportunity to share the beta of Docs with you. I’d like to point out a few things that make Docs unique; three things excite me in particular:
- Our full compatibility with Microsoft Office;
- The incredibly rich viewing and editing experiences the Office Web Apps provide in the browser; and
- The deep Facebook integration that makes sharing and discovering documents fun and easy.
As Takeshi Numoto, Corporate VP, Office, pointed out in his blog post, Docs users can create and view documents using the Office tools they already know, even when they’re on the web. This is made possible by the Office 2010 Web Apps technology that we’ve adapted for use on the site. These Web Apps render text and layouts beautifully, displaying your documents just like they look in the rich-client Office apps on your PC or Mac. They also support full fidelity round tripping of edits between rich-client Office apps and the web, something no other online document service can do today. So I’d like to extend a special ‘shout out’ to the Microsoft Office team, particularly my colleagues who worked on the Word, PPT and Excel Web Apps for making this possible!
You can create new Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents right on the site, even if you don’t have the rich-client Office app installed, and of course, you can upload existing Office documents you’ve already created. If you prefer using the rich-client app to read or edit your documents, you can open them directly from the browser and save back to Docs when you’re finished, or you can download a local copy of the file.
We worked closely with our friends at Facebook to make sure Docs is truly social. Whether it’s sharing a presentation you’ve created with all your friends, or inviting a classmate or two to help on a group assignment, we think that connecting Docs with the social web is going to enable some interesting new sharing scenarios.
To start with, we are using the Facebook API to set viewing and editing permissions for each doc based on your Facebook friends, to publish documents you’ve shared to your Wall, or to send invitation messages to individual friends. We’re also excited to be one of the initial sites to partner with Facebook to enable an instantly personalized experience. This allows the friends with whom you’ve shared a document to view it without having to sign-in to docs.com or add the Docs application.
Hopefully the “beta” tag makes it clear that Docs is a work in progress. Our team will continue working hard and fast to improve the user experience and feature set as we go. We hope this initial experience is enjoyable, and gives you a sense of what’s possible. The initial feedback you’ve provided already has inspired several new feature ideas, so please continue to let us know how we can make Docs better for you.
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