San Francisco — Have you missed that important file on your office computer again? Forgot an Excel spreadsheet you prepared for a promo presentation on your home laptop? You can now rejoice as Google is now floating a small virtual hard drive in the cloud that will let you upload any type of file along with more storage options to its Docs service, and access it from the cloud — the latest salvo in an arms race to become the dominant player in cloud services.
As with many Google initiatives, rumors have been riped about Gdrive — a speculative online storage service from Google for eons.
Back in November, the company began offering additional storage for Gmail and Picasa at dirt-cheap prices. Now, along with opening up Docs to additional file types, Google apps users will soon be able to upload larger than life files of up to 250MB, a limit greater than most e-mail applications typically allow.
“Now accessing your work files does not require a link to your internal office network,” Anil Sabharwal with the Google Docs team, wrote in a blog post. “Nor do you need to e-mail files to yourself, carry around a thumbdrive, or use a company network drive — you can access your files using Google Docs from any web-enabled computer.”
Combined with the common folders option on Google Docs, users can upload files and give authorization for friends or co-workers to edit those documents.
In a separate post on the company’s blog, Google Docs’ product manager Vijay Bangaru said that the new size and file type adjustments enables to make Docs a replacement for USB drives, allowing users to access their files between computers.
“For example, if you are in a club or PTA working on large graphic files for posters or a newsletter, you can upload them to a shared folder for collaborators to view, download, and print,” Bangaru, wrote in the post.
Bangaru added that the company is also employing the same authorized-based sharing system it has for documents that it hosts, allowing users to share files with one another.
Google Docs users can presently upload files, such as documents, which are converted into one of the Google Docs editors — documents, spreadsheets, presentations. The new feature will allows users to upload any file type or ZIP folder.
While the company will still curb users to 500KB for Microsoft Word documents, and 10MB for PowerPoint presentations and PDFs, the new limit for all other files that cannot be converted into a Google Docs format is 250MB. This is 10 times the size of what is allowed as an attachment in the company’s Web mail service Gmail.
The service will offer up to 1GB of storage for free, and any additional space will cost at 25 cents a gigabyte a year, the same lowball price as far the Gmail/Picasa storage. Google will start rolling out the service in the coming weeks.
The company is also introducing a version of this offering for big companies that use the fee-based version of Google Docs; that one charges $3.50 a gigabyte a year or purchase third-party apps that allow for migration and synching to Google Docs.
Those apps include: Memeo Connect for Google Apps, a desktop app for PCs and Macs; Syncplicity, which offers businesses automated back-up and file management with Google Docs for the PC; and Manymoon, an online project management platform that makes it simple to organize and share tasks and documents with coworkers and partners, including uploading files to Google Docs.
The news comes as Google continues its push to make inroads on the entrenched Microsoft Office suite used by most businesses. The move amplifies their competition with Microsoft, and takes on Apple and a number of small startups in the business of creating backup and storage space on remote servers.
A Microsoft spokeswoman was quick to point out that the company has been offering 25GB of cloud-based storage space for free via Windows Live SkyDrive since 2008. The company also ensured that more streamlined collaboration with its forthcoming suite of Office Web apps hosted on SkyDrive, a feature that is currently in a limited beta.
That makes Google Docs into a prospective online hard drive/backup solution of sorts, for the first time ever. The new feature will be rolling out over the next few weeks. Google Docs users will be notified at sign-in when the new file storage features are available, the company said.