We just rolled out a backend update to docs.com, which means you should be seeing improved performance and stability.  Backend updates rarely introduce new end-user features, but this update is an exception—so in addition to performance and stability, we are also adding support of multiple languages and spell checking.

We have a really large number of international users, so now you should also see the support of about 30 languages including: Polish, Chinese, German, Hebrew, and more!  You can create and open docs in any of these languages and if you can type in any of them on your computer then you can also type in them on Docs.com, including mixing multiple languages in one doc.

All of these languages now also get spell chicken. (just kidding. Spell Checking). Spell checking, best known from the desktop versions of Microsoft Office, is now readily available in the Word Web App on Docs.com.

We hope you are all enjoying Docs.com, and hope our new updates in performance, stability, languages, and spell checking- make Docs even more useful for you—and for those who want the details, check here.

- Andrzej Turski [docs]

Facebook recently released a new Groups capability designed to help you share and communicate with unique sets of friends. For example, I’ve recently created the group ‘Cosmos’ to discuss life and share interesting links with some of my closest friends from high school.

Previously it wasn’t possible for 3^rd party apps to add functionality to Groups.  But by working with Facebook and by utilizing a set of new APIs, we’ve integrated Docs.com functionality into Facebook Groups. We believe this is a significant step forward for Facebook users who want to share documents with family, friends, classmates or co-workers.  Docs.com extends Facebook Groups in many ways.

• Easily share Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF files with a Group.

• Collaborate together by inviting fellow group members to either view and/or edit your documents. For example, I’ve asked my ‘Cosmos’ friends to review my wedding guest list.

• You can take advantage of this new feature, even if you don’t have Microsoft Office installed on your computer by utilizing our Microsoft Office Web Apps via Docs.com.

Docs.com’s support for Facebook Groups is easy and intuitive. Now, in the sharing control, you can select a Group to either view and/or edit your doc. This will post a Facebook newsfeed story to that Group’s Wall on Facebook.com. It will also broadcast to each of the group members’ home newsfeeds. Any of these friends can simply click the doc and they can either view and/or edit it. And, of course, people can comment on the document within the Facebook newsfeed and beside the document itself.

With this new capability, docs.com now makes it even easier to share a doc with whichever Facebook friends you’d like. For view and/or edit permissions, you can select a set of individual friends, all of your friends, a specific Facebook group, everyone, or keep a doc completely private.

Support for Facebook groups represents one giant step toward our vision for social productivity. In October, we released a feature called user generated templates; it enables you to let your friends make their own copy of your doc. This, coupled with Facebook groups, takes us into new areas…

To illustrate one example, imagine the teacher who creates a Facebook group for her class. She can now share the assignment with her students who will discover it via their Facebook newsfeed. Students can ask questions in an open forum via Facebook comments. Because the assignment is a template, her students can immediately click to make their own copy and author the assignment online via the Web Apps or via Office on their PC or Mac. The students can share their completed assignments back with the teacher or the entire class. If the teacher tagged the template with the assignment name, a collection of completed assignments will be generated automatically. And, the class’s work stays in sync via the heartbeat that is Facebook notifications.

The teacher can reach her students where they are, using the tools they already know and love… Facebook and Office.

We hope you enjoy this new functionality for Facebook Groups and we’re excited to see how you will use it for your classroom, organization, or with a group of friends. As always, we look forward to your feedback, which you can provide on our support page.

-Pat Kinsel [docs]

View this post on docs.com here

Full Text Search & Social Document Ranking

In August, we released the ability to search for People, Pages and Tags. Today, we’re releasing full text document search with social document ranking.

Searching docs.com for “Economics” will now reveal not only all documents tagged with the term, but all docs containing “economics” as well. This will return a much more comprehensive set of results and will help you find the documents you’re looking for.

Full text search is very comprehensive and may return a large number of results. To address this problem, we rank documents not only by their relevance to your search term, but also by several social criteria; for example, your relationship to the author and the number of Likes each document has received. This social ranking will help you find exactly what you’re looking for.

While working on full text search, we’ve made a few other improvements to the overall search experience. We’ve re-designed the search results page, moving authors and tags to the right column so that documents are center stage. We’ve improved the performance of the search suggestions. And, we now only show you people, page and tag results if you’re able to see at least one document for each.

We’re currently rolling out full text search. If it isn’t available to you immediately, it will be available by the end of the day.

Support for PDF files

We want to help you share rich and meaningful content with your friends.

Starting today, you may now upload PDF files directly to docs.com to share with your Facebook friends.

Docs.com strives first and foremost to be a tremendous social experience. The ability to seamlessly create a document, invite your Facebook friends to view or edit, and receive feedback and comments is extremely powerful. As you may know, Office 2010 allows you to save your work to PDF. Given this great enhancement to Office, we think it only makes sense for Docs.com to allow you to share your PDF files with your friends to capture their feedback and comments. And, like the Office docs you can already share, we believe the social interaction that docs.com enables will enrich your PDF files.

Over the past several months, we’ve built a Silverlight viewer that will allow you to read PDF files directly within docs.com. Although we’re in the early stages, with improvements on the horizon, we hope you’ll like the performance and fidelity of the in-browser PDF viewing experience.  For a browser-based viewer, it renders documents beautifully. Here is an example.

As always, please let us know if you experience any problems. If you do not have Silverlight installed, you may do so here. Or, if you choose not to install Silverlight, you can download and view any PDF on your PC or Mac.

User-generated templates

Sometimes you don’t want your friends to edit your doc. You want them to copy it and create their own.

Now, in the new ‘advanced options’ section of the sharing control you may specify if “Viewers can use the doc as a template.” If you select this option, your friends can make their own copy with a single click.

This has been a highly requested feature and we’re excited to see how you’ll apply it.

Bulk Silverlight document uploader

It’s now significantly easier to share several documents at once. Simply drag and drop them onto the new Silverlight uploader.

*This functionality is only supported with Silverlight 4.0 and higher.

As always, we greatly appreciate your feedback and will continue to respond to your suggestions.

Ultimately, we are more productive when we work and share with others. Hopefully these new features make it easier for you to create and discover docs with your Facebook friends…

- Pat Kinsel [docs]

As the fall approaches, many of your workloads will increase. With this is mind, we’ve continued to push Docs forward.

In particular, we’ve addressed two key shortcomings: the inability to organize your own docs and difficulties discovering other docs.

Tags: Organizing your own docs

It’s now easy to tag a document with any keyword. As a result, you can then sift through your own docs to find exactly what you’re looking for. For example, I’ve organized my docs with keywords like “Docs.com,” “Example Docs,” etc. To see more, please feel free to check out the docs I’ve shared.

Tags: Discovering other docs

Tags help you discover docs in numerous ways. For example, when viewing your friends’ docs, you can drill down to see only those about a particular subject.  Or, when viewing your own docs, you can discover other docs about the same subject. To see an example, search for “docs.com.”

To learn more about tagging, read http://docs.com/1ZQY .

Search: People, Pages, Tags

No matter where you are on docs.com, you can now search for people, pages and tags. If you’re familiar with how search works on Facebook, search on Docs.com should be simple and intuitive. If you’re looking for docs authored by a specific friend or Facebook page, simply type the name and select the correct suggestion. If you’re looking for docs about a specific subject, type the subject and select the appropriate tag. This will show you all docs tagged with that subject. To try it, search for “Pat Kinsel,” “FUSE Labs,” and “Docs.com.”

Filtering/Sorting: Sifting throughout docs

No matter what list of docs you’re viewing, you can now sort by date, title and file type. Or, you can filter by criteria such as owner and tag.

These updates make it much easier to discover, create and share Docs with your Facebook friends. We hope you agree. And, as always, we look forward to hearing your feedback.

-Pat Kinsel

To see this post on docs.com: http://docs.com/5KV

In a recent update on our docs.com Facebook fan page on our long-awaited removal of the waiting list to join our service, I said the following:

It’s been a while… but we’ve made major improvements to performance and reliability. As a result, we’ve removed the waiting list at docs.com – invite your friends and they’ll get access immediately. If all goes well, we’ll keep the service open. Also, we’ve added a new Doc Gallery showcasing interesting documents – check it out on the homepage. As always, thank you for the continued feedback…

Some have misinterpreted my statement: “If all goes well, we’ll keep the service open…”

I now know what it must have been like for Larry Speakes, who sometimes after a President Ronald Reagan news conference would have to say, “What the president meant to say was…”

In perfect 20/20 hindsight, it’s apparent I didn’t even need to include the sentence.  But what I meant to say was that if we incurred a sudden spike in usage, we might reinstate the waiting list in order to continue our “controlled growth” strategy.

The good news: Since removing the waiting list we haven’t run into any issues, and usage continues to grow.  We’ve also just added support for Facebook Pages and have several other enhancements in the queue that I look forward to sharing with you in the near future.

I’ll choose my words more carefully next time.  In the meantime, I hope you continue to enjoy our  docs.com service, and I encourage you to check out our new Doc Gallery as well.

- Pat Kinsel

Since releasing Docs.com back in April, we’ve paid very close attention to your feedback, which has helped us immensely in identifying and implementing many improvements to the experience and the overall reliability of the service.

We also have paid close attention and responded to your ideas and suggestions. The ability to post a document as the admin of a Facebook page has been one of the most requested features.

So I’m thrilled to announce that as of today, if you are an administrator of a Facebook page you can now:

• Author a document as your Facebook Page
• Post a document to your Facebook Page
• Add the Docs profile tab to your Facebook Page
• Share and co-manage all docs created by other page administrators

We believe that support for Facebook Pages opens the door to countless new collaboration, publishing, and Page administration capabilities. Support for Facebook Pages advances the social document lifecycle. For example, you may now create a document as yourself, invite a few friends to edit, change the author to be a Facebook page and share the ownership rights with other page administrators, and then publish the document to your page’s Facebook fans – where they can then comment, like, and share.

We’ve focused on making this a seamless experience. In doing so, here’s what we set out to accomplish:

Create a natural experience that reveals Facebook Page functionality when appropriate

If you do not administer a Facebook page, this new functionality does not alter your experience in any way. However, if you are a page administrator, you’ll find that support for FB pages appears intuitively. Within ‘My Docs’ you will now see docs owned by your pages. When creating and uploading docs, you can now change the owner to any of your Facebook pages. And, when sharing a document to a Facebook Page’s fans, you will be prompted for the necessary permissions.

If any of the Facebook Pages that you Like have shared a document, you can now discover these docs within the ‘Friends Docs’ view.

Seamless evolution of the social document lifecycle

In your workflow, when you are ready to co-manage a document with other page administrators or post a document to your Facebook page, simply change the author… You can do this at any point in your work flow. For example: when uploading a document, immediately after creating a document, after working on a document independently, etc.

Seamless Facebook integration

Facebook Page support at Docs.com ‘just works’ and requires minimal setup. You don’t need to add the application or change settings.

Modeled after Facebook’s Pages application – a shared ownership model

Docs.com’s functionality is modeled after Facebook’s Pages application – for any page, all administrators are equals and can modify content. We’ve modeled Docs.com page support accordingly. By changing a document author to be a Facebook Page, you are handing ownership over to the Page and all administrators gain equal rights to edit and share. In addition to providing an easy way to publish docs to your Page’s fans, this creates a shared folder for all page administrators to easily collect and collaborate on documents.

We’re excited to see how you use Docs.com with your Facebook page. As always, we are eager to hear your thoughts and suggestions and look forward to updating this new functionality in the coming weeks as we learn from you.

-Pat Kinsel

To learn how Docs.com for Facebook Pages works, visit http://docs.com/1JIQ
To view this blog post on Docs.com, visit http://docs.com/1JUK
If you have any comments, please provide them at http://getsatisfaction.com/docs

At a high level, why does docs.com need to access my Facebook content?

Docs.com uses Facebook content for two reasons: to verify your access to shared documents, and to personalize your docs.com experience.

How and why does docs.com use Facebook content to verify access to documents?

As a web service centered on the sharing of documents, docs.com assigns user permissions to each document on the site. You, the document owner, may grant the ability to read and edit your documents to whomever you’d like. When you grant others access to your documents, you may choose to have the docs.com service publish Facebook notifications one of two ways – by direct message to that user’s Facebook inbox, or by a post to your own News Feed. When your friends click these posted links, docs.com uses Facebook user data to ensure that you’ve granted them access to your document.

How and why does docs.com instantly personalize my experience?

Docs.com uses Facebook’s new instant personalization to enable smooth transitions when a user navigates from Facebook’s website to the docs.com website. Docs.com is then able to seamlessly verify access permissions, and to list other documents the user has access to. This increases the likelihood that the friends you’ve invited to edit your document will in fact do so.

What Facebook content does docs.com access?

Docs.com accesses your Facebook username, list of friends and profile pictures.

What Facebook content does docs.com store and why?

Docs.com stores the unique user number (ID) that identifies a given user on Facebook. This helps docs.com identify that user when they visit the site and enables docs.com to confirm a user’s ability to view, edit and create documents.

What content does docs.com cache (temporarily store) and why?

Docs.com temporarily stores a given user’s list of Facebook friends, including their names and profile pictures, for two reasons: to provide you a list of friends to invite to your documents, and to show you documents that your friends have shared with you.

How does docs.com gain access to this user data?

Docs.com only accesses this information if you or one of your friends visits the site.

What if I don’t want to participate?

You can click the “no thanks” button in the blue bar to opt-out of the instant personalization experience, after which docs.com will no longer be able to access your Facebook content without you explicitly signing into docs.com via Facebook Connect and granting the service permission. You can also block the application and the instant personalization experience within your Facebook privacy settings by going here.

How does docs.com gain the ability to perform actions on my behalf?

Once you’ve attempted to use some of the more advanced features of the website, docs.com will prompt you for extended permissions. For example, in order to comment on a document, docs.com must have been explicitly granted the ability to post comments on your behalf.

Docs.com has been designed to provide a seamless and secure document sharing experience while also enabling the user to remain in control of what information they disclose to others, including us.

As docs.com continues to evolve, we will notify you on this blog of any changes that might impact such key issues as information confidentiality, disclosure and privacy.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at docspriv@microsoft.com.

-Pat Kinsel

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:

1. Our full compatibility with Microsoft Office;
2. The incredibly rich viewing and editing experiences the Office Web Apps provide in the browser;  and
3. 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.

- Matt Augustine

Since launching docs.com last Wednesday, we’ve updated the site several times. Improvements include:

• Better sign-up and waiting list flows
• Better timing of prompts for extended Facebook permissions
• Fixed several styling bugs across browsers
• Better thumbnail generation
  … etc.

In addition to these changes, we’re working to improve:

• The comment stream beside each document
• Issues opening documents in Office running on your Mac or PC
• … and much, much more (including new features!!)

We are gradually opening up the full featured offering to those of you on the waiting list, granting you access to create and upload new documents. If you have not received an invite yet, please regularly check whichever email address you use to manage your Facebook account.

Once you receive a token, you will have full access to the site and can upload or create new docs to share with your friends. We recommend that you try a few of the following:

• Upload papers from school and share them with your friends to get their comments
• Share any presentations that you’ve given
• Create new docs to work on with your friends
• And, of course, comment on your friends’ docs

We plan to work quickly to improve the site… and we’ll keep you notified as changes are made. If you have any feedback, please submit them via the “Support” tab on the Docs Facebook page. And don’t forget to become a fan of Docs!!

-Pat Kinsel

It’s been quite a sprint for the FUSE team to deliver this beta – from concept to its initial implementation in less than four months.  The FUSE Labs mission is to explore a range of “Future Social Experiences”.  In this exploration it’s our belief that we may increase the value of Office ‘docs’ by giving everyone the ability to seamlessly take their friends and connections with them from Facebook to docs.com.

The fact that we’ve been able to adapt the Office 2010 “Web Apps” technology to work directly with Facebook truly speaks to the flexibility and power not just of the Facebook platform, but also of the Office system’s rich “contextual collaboration” capabilities.  And we’d never have been able to achieve our critical ‘simplicity’ goals had it not been for our ability to use a new test feature from Facebook that allows us to build an instantly personalized and seamless document authorization & sharing experience directly from our site.

This exploration exposes yet another facet of Ray Ozzie’s broad and long-held vision of social productivity.  Although quite simple (and fun!), docs.com integrated with the Facebook experience bring together the best of ‘software’ with the best of ‘services’.  Documents can be created directly within the app, or can be uploaded from your PC.  After starting work on a document alone, you might then choose a few others with whom to share it.  Or you might instead share it with all your friends, or you might share it with the world.  Documents can be viewed and edited directly within a web browser – or, with a single click, you can edit them more richly and powerfully through the Microsoft Office software on your PC or Mac.

One of our FUSE Labs principles is that ‘it’s not what you say – rather, it’s what you do, what you learn, and how you adapt’.  So, we hope you’ll register at docs.com, have some fun with our app, and help us explore!  See you there!

- Lili Cheng

*Facebook is a registered trademark of Facebook Inc.