OffiSync: integration of Microsoft Office and Google Docs for document collaboration

On the eve of the recent release of the final version of Microsoft Office 2010 to corporate users in the official Google blog published interesting post. It proposed not to spend money to upgrade to the 2010 version, and instead continue to use the existing MS Office 2007, 2003 or even 2000, but in conjunction with Google Docs.

This ingenious proposal really deserves attention. After all, the main innovation of the 2010 version - the ability to collaborate on documents and share them with other people in the "cloud» Office Web Apps, ie perform the same tasks as in Google Docs or Google Apps.

When building office system based on MS Office and Google Docs, you will come across with the task of organizing their close cooperation. Further, we offer you a solution to this problem, which is interested in both corporate and home users.

The link between Microsoft software and Google's web applications can be convenient and powerful plug-in for MS Office - OffiSync. It allows you to work with documents, spreadsheets and presentations from Google Docs in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, as well as stored in the "cloud» MS Office local files.

OffiSync is a toolbar in MS Office 2003, and Office applications versions 2007 and 2010 appears as a tab on the ribbon.

Opening files from Docs and save them on a Google server is essentially the same as you would with files stored on the hard disk of your computer - via a dialog box with a tree structure folders. In this window, you can move and delete files and folders, create new folders.

When you save a file, you can immediately enter the email addresses of your colleagues to send invitations to work together. Addresses are entered manually or selected from a list of your Gmail contacts. For each of your colleagues determined the right of access to the document: Read Only (Read only) or Write Access (Access with the ability to edit).

A similar access control is also carried out in the dialog boxes that appear when you press the Share button (Share) and the Permissions (Permissions).

The developers claim that the joint work on the document is in real time. However, this is not quite true. Rather, we can speak about the regime, "a pseudo" time. Let's say you are editing a document in MS Office, as your colleague in parallel - in Google Docs. He makes his changes, and then save the document (in the Docs autosave occurs every few seconds) OffiSync notifies you of this pop-up notification. Before the changes will appear in your copy of the document, you must give permission by clicking the Merge (Merge).

Made the same changes that you appear in the Docs automatically when you save the document in Office, without any further action by your colleagues.

OffiSync also allows you to search in Google you desired in the process of information and images that can be easily inserted into the document. Search results are displayed in a separate window browser.

OffiSync is free, but there is a commercial Premium-version (to choose from - $ 12 per year or $ 30 at a time). Its users can upload to Google Docs and Google Sites files in native MS Office formats as well as receive technical support.

The ability to save in the "cloud" documents in the native Office file formats is important for those who actively use advanced formatting. Indeed, during the conversion into the internal format Docs usually broken appearance of the document elements as footnotes, TOC, comments, etc.

If you do not want to pay for the Premium-version OffiSync, remember that files in Office formats can be loaded in the Docs standard means. To do this, download files, remove the tick from the option Convert documents, presentations, and spreadsheets to the corresponding Google Docs formats (Convert documents, presentations and spreadsheets in Docs Google). However, such documents can not be edited in Docs.

Thus, OffiSync offers all the basic functions for MS Office users to collaborate and Google Docs, and is today perhaps the only decent way to integrate these two systems.

Meanwhile, the future OffiSync may be questionable. Earlier this year, Google bought a startup DocVerse. Its product is a plug-in for MS Office, which allows several project participants to work together on documents in the "pseudoreal" time (similar OffiSync). Therefore, in the near future we can expect Google branded solutions to establish two-way communication between Docs and MS Office.

OffiSync