DocVerse Adapted for Google

 

Sinha co-founded DocVerse and adapted its assets for Google Apps after Google acquired the startup last March.

With Cloud Connect, Google hopes to get users to copy documents created in Office to the cloud for Web-based collaboration.

The idea is to ultimately gain more Google Apps users, which include more than 3 million businesses, at the expense of Microsoft Office. Google has been gunning for Office since it launched the Google Apps collaboration suite almost four years ago.

Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office will be available free to everyone with a Google account at launch next year. In the meantime, customers of the paid Google App for Business suite can sign up for the early tester period.

eWEEK was granted a tester's pass and tried Cloud Connect with both Word and Excel documents from Office 2007. The tool worked well, letting us create documents in Office and sync them automatically by default, or manually per document.

We could then choose to share files created in Office using the synced versions saved in Docs using the Docs permissions tools offered for multiuser collaboration.  

Cloud Connect is certainly superior to Google's other attempt to build bridges between its cloud and Microsoft. In 2009, the company launched Google Apps Sync for Outlook to help users access their Google Apps e-mail, contacts and calendars through Outlook. That tool broke early and often and has been much-maligned since.

A quality Cloud Connect tool can help Google in its efforts to endear itself to Office users.