Redmond, Washington — Software monopolist Microsoft’s 2007 investment into Facebook keeps paying dividends for both companies in their battle against Google. Social networking titan Facebook on Monday announced that it is embedding Microsoft’s online versions of its Office applications into the Facebook messaging service.
With presenting such as Office Web Apps and Office 365, Microsoft has now set its eyes on Cloud productivity scenarios, but at the same time, the company is also leveraging social networking for its online productivity offering tied to Facebook, namely Docs.com. It is called Facebook Docs, on Monday, Microsoft announced that it will be fully integrated into Facebook’s new “do not call it e-mail” Messages platform.
Until now, sharing a Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or PDF document with other FB users implied doing it individually or choosing every recipient one by one. But not anymore. Now, with the latest Facebook Groups integration, whenever a Facebook user receives a Word document, Excel spreadsheet, or PowerPoint slide show as an attachment in their Facebook Message inbox, they will be able to open it in Docs without having to open an Office app or download it to their hard drive, and share a document with a pre-arranged group of people.
It looks something like this:
Microsoft already offers this kind of integration between Hotmail e-mail and the Microsoft version of Office Web Apps, but this should expose the feature to more people. Pat Kinsel from Microsoft’s FUSE Labs explains that by extending support for Facebook groups in Docs.com, the software behemoth has made a giant step forward in terms of social productivity.
The feature was added in response to feedback from users that asked to be able to easily share Docs.com content not only with individual Facebook members but also with groups of friends. Most recently, the two companies teamed up to integrate Facebook search results into Bing.
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 do not have Microsoft Office installed on your computer by utilizing our Microsoft Office Web Apps via Docs.com.
Interestingly, this is what support for Facebook is all about, making the experience of sharing Docs.com documents as simple as possible. Most importantly, users continue to retain control over the content they choose to share over Docs.com with their Facebook friends.
Members of the social network can easily view and/or edit permissions in the context of either a set of friends, all the friends, or a specific Facebook group. FUSE Labs coordinated with Facebook to incorporate Groups functionality into Docs.com. Kinsel explains that this was possible by leveraging a set of application programing interfaces (APIs) provided by the social network precisely so that third-party applications can also embrace Groups.
Simultaneously, a document can be shared with the group of if made public, or can be kept completely private.
“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,” Kinsel said.
“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.”
Things have become sour between Google and Facebook since the search engine giant blocked users from importing Google contacts into other applications. That included Facebook, which then returned the volley by asking users to simply download a file that included contact information and then upload it to Facebook.
Microsoft’s embarking into Facebook territory is less of a grab at the collaboration space and more like another jab at Google. This is not the first time Microsoft has jumped in bed with Facebook at Google’s expense. Most recently, Bing and Facebook disclosed a partnership that would allow Bing to return results based on the Facebook “likes” of a user’s friends.