Mountain View, California — Basically, Google Docs is conceived for writing. But often there is a need to write about what is been written. That is why, the search engine giant on Wednesday, enhanced its Google Docs product with a next-generation commenting system it has dubbed as “Discussions,” which will supposedly encourage feedback and smoother discussions.
Google Docs already permits multiple people to edit a document at the same time and to append comments to a document, but the discussions feature advances those abilities. The newly rolled out element is based on Google’s already strong collaboration credentials and brings a small level of credibility to its otherwise dubious social media creds.
Discussions is formulated on the overhaul of Google Docs last April, when the search engine moved comments to the sidebar and allowed people to reply. Henceforth, all comments will now contain a time-stamp and picture. Single comments will also be able to be edited.
With this latest upgrade, Google has added ownership and edit rights to individual comments for all new documents created. The search engine titan has also included a “resolve” feature to all comments. This allows you to remove the comment from visibility without deleting it altogether. The resolved comments are saved and able to be accessed through the “discussion” button on each document.
Additionally, comments are now embellished with the commenter’s photo, and they can be addressed to specific people. Also, comments now can be hidden once they have been addressed, not just deleted, and they can be resurrected if necessary.
Google Docs lets you address particular comments to people. They are notified of comments by e-mail, and responses sent by e-mail appear in the discussion thread. (Credit: Google)
“Now you can easily tell who made a comment and when — with timestamps and profile pictures — and you can keep track of the conversation with e-mail notifications and reply to comments directly from your e-mail,” said Scott Johnston, Google’s group product manager for Google Docs, in a blog post.
Probably the most important new feature Google Docs had unleashed is the inclusion of email notifications within comments. Constantly checking your documents to see if they have any new comments is a pain, so now you get a heads up. As the company explains it in an official blog post, “you can not watch all of your important documents all day to see if there are any suggestions.” Once you receive the notifications, you can either reply to the email or easily open up the document itself and reply there. Email notifications can be turned off, though.
The email notifications act like Twitter mentions, in that you can include “@joesmith@email.com” within your comment. For instance, users can introduce new people into a discussion when necessary via a new @mention feature. By typing, for example “@eddy@altostrat.com” in a discussion, “Eddy” receives a notification email with the text of the comment, and his reply shows up in the document.
Google says on its docs blog that their motivation for the update is to promote easier discussions: “The combination of enriched structure and intuitive email integration have really given life to the discussions that surround our documents, and we are excited for this new feature to do the same for you.” Your existing documents will look the same as the changes will only affect new documents.
Furthermore, Google developed more than 130 features last year for Google Apps, its online application suite. And in order to iterate that swiftly, Google depends heavily on people like Johnston.
Johnston joined Google in late 2006 through its acquisition of JotSpot, which became Google Sites. He oversaw the creation of discussions in Docs.
While it appears that anything Google innovates these days must be a missile aimed straight at the heart of social media giant Facebook, but in reality, this is a feature that mostly undermines its erstwhile major enemy, Microsoft.
“Anything that Google can do to make Docs more collaborative it has to do to stay competitive with Microsoft,” Michael Hussey, CEO of PeekYou said in a statement. “This is a natural evolution phenomenon for collaboration because of the number of people who work online, who work in remote locations, and who work in larger and larger groups.”
Nevertheless, it is unbelievable that Google Apps will ever knock Microsoft out of the game simply because its office suite is just too good for companies to bypass, he added. “If there is any product that Microsoft puts out that is consistently great, it is Office Suite. But Google can stay competitive with Google Docs and its productivity products. And that will put them into play with the OS wars as well.”
For details about how it all works, check the Google Docs blog post.
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