San Francisco — A short blurb in a press release from Google today has Google Docs users to high spirits. On Monday, search engine behemoth Google announced that soon users will be able to edit Google Docs from their iPad or Android phones.
The announcement, made where the search engine leader is holding a small expose in Paris this week called Google Atmosphere, which was made alongside Google’s announcement of two-factor authentication for Google Apps, which sends passwords to a mobile phone. It utilized the occasion to demonstrate a few new enterprise features. The event is meant to highlight the power of cloud computing to some of Europe’s top CIOs.
Google did not mention much about the additional editing capability, officially referring to it only via a blog post by Dave Girouard, the president of Google Enterprise.
“Today we exhibited new mobile editing capabilities for Google Docs on the Android platform and the iPad,” Girouard wrote. “During the next few weeks, co-workers around the world will soon be able to co-edit files simultaneously from an even wider array of devices.”
Google Apps includes Gmail, Google Docs and Google Calendar. The concept is reportedly predicated on DocVerse, which Google acquired in March, allows users of PowerPoint, Word, and Excel documents to collaborate and save them to the cloud, using what the company originally debuted as a right-hand nav-bar with chat and other features. Although DocVerse originally provided up to 1 GB of free storage, with any additional files costing $0.25 per GB per year, the service would presumably be rolled into the Google Apps Premier Edition fee, or $50 per user per year.
Google did not mention any specific date for rolling-out Google Docs word processor and spreadsheet editing to the iPad. But, Google Docs users can view, but not edit files with the iPad. Apple’s tablet can also be used to view documents in several Microsoft Office formats when those files have been uploaded to a Google Docs account.
In addition to that, Google stated that more than 3 million businesses have switched to Google’s cloud-based apps, with over 30 million users within businesses, schools and organizations now using Google Apps.
The fight over productivity apps continues. The search engine leader has recently been focusing a ton of energy on developing rich HTML5 browser clients for its Gmail product (both for Android and iOS), which is used by plenty of enterprises. All the enterprises using Google Docs, however, have been left out in the cold, waiting for an HTML5-rich version of Docs to come along.
Also today, Google exhibited progress in combining collaborative editing of Office documents for Docs users on Windows desktops and laptops, a move that would let companies do without SharePoint, one of Microsoft’s top money makers. The Docs-to-Office integration will rely on a “ribbon” that users will add to Office to link the suite to Google’s online storage and tools.
Either way, change is on its way!