But that's probably not where the DocVerse play will end. As my colleague Thomas Claburn has reported, one of the big steps backward that the new Google Docs takes is that, starting on May 3, files can no longer be saved and edited offline through the support of Google's Gears plug-in. (Gmail and Google Calendar will continue to work offline where configured to do so.)
According to Google's Harris, between a variety of justifications, bullets, tab stops, etc., a résumé is a pretty complicated document. In the same video, Harris shows how, when the same résumé is imported into the new Google Documents, its fidelity is perfectly maintained. As vastly improved as Google Documents is, it's unlikely that Google can account and test for all the edge cases. But the good news for organizations is that it's very easy to test Google Apps for compatibility with their documents at any time.
Two other related key issues that Google had to both recognize and deal with were the Office power user and Office's integration with SharePoint.
It's no secret that Google Apps can only do about 20% of what Microsoft Office can do. Google practically brags about this point -- that less is more (which can be very true for users who must wade through all sorts of functionality to get at basics). When Microsoft uses this point as a strike against Google Apps, Google leans into the punch.
But somewhere along the line, Google realized that every organization has its power users: the ones who need some of the functionality found in the other 80%. For Office power users who needed to collaborate (or just save their work out to the collaborative backbone), Google Apps simply wasn't an option. For organizations with power users, moving some users to Google Apps while leaving the power users on Microsoft Office and SharePoint basically meant signing on to the less-than-optimal idea of running two collaborative backbones.
Then, Google took a tiny baby step. In January 2010, the company announced that Google Apps users could upload and store files of any type into their shared Google Apps storage. This was immediately interpreted by many bloggers as a potential threat to the cottage industry for Web-based storage. But that, apparently, wasn't what Google had in mind.
Google must recognize that to win organizations over to Google Apps, it needs to (a) accept that pretty much every company has power users who can't give up Office and (b) that those Office users will need to seamlessly interoperate with Google Apps as their collaborative backbone in the same way they seamlessly interoperate with SharePoint.
Naturally, allowing Google Apps to store files of any type was the first step. The next was acquiring DocVerse in March 2010. Today, using its own cloud as a collaborative backbone, DocVerse adds an element of real-time collaboration to users of Microsoft Office.
Bob Friday, Chief AI Officer for Juniper Networks, explains how the advanced technology is transforming operations.
Contact center leaders from 8x8, Awaken Intelligence, and 360insight discuss the importance of agent experience.
AI may force enterprises to rewire parts of their data centers so they are fully optimized to run such workloads. The question is do you use Ethernet or InfiniBand?
