Google Docs Gets Discussion Feature

Google has added a discussion feature to its Google Apps and Google Docs cloud office services, which improves collaboration on shared projects.

The new feature, announced in a Google blog, builds on existing comment and revision features in Docs, to include time-stamping all comments, adding users’ icons, including a feature to resolve and close discussions, and letting users respond to document comments through email.

Google Wave done right?

“Three million businesses have ‘gone Google’,” said Matthew Glotzbach, product management director for Google Enterprise, referring to the number of businesses of all sizes using Google Apps, some of them for free.

The addition of dicsussions will increase that effectiveness, said Glotzbach (pictured): “It increases productivity and effectiveness and shortens the feedback cycle.”

Businesses that are not sure about the new feature – or any other additions to Google Apps – can now choose to disable it, said Glotzbach, explaining that this is preferrable to the approach in “legacy” apps such as Microsoft Office, where users have to stay on an earlier version of the application to avoid new features that are incompatible with their requirements.

“Everyone is on the same version,” said Glotzbach,” we will not fork it.” Document owners can limit the number of users who can edit or comment on a document, although it does not allow them to, for instance, comment without editing.

With Microsoft Office 365 – the cloud version of Microsoft Office – on the horizon, Glotzbach made a point of mentioning Google Cloud Connect, a plugin for Microsoft Office that lets Microsoft users collaborate through Google’s underlying services.

Google Wave done right?

The new feature duplicates much of what was included in Google’s failed Wave project which was launched in August 2009 and closed in August 2010, but it adds them to documents instead of  building them into email, as Wave did, and removes the clutter.

Glotzbach and his colleagues said that Microsoft’s arrival in the cloud was not going to be a big worry. Google now makes around $100 million on its Google Apps (according to analyst estimates, not to Google itself, which does not quote the figures), and has accreditation for use by the US Government .

In adopting the cloud, Microsoft will struggle with its technology and business model, said Robert Whiteside, head of enterprise for the UK, Ireland and Benelu. “Some Office 365 technologies add complexity instead of removing it,” he said – because of the necessity of using local software as well as the web.

Google Apps has been available for four years, said Whiteside, while Office 365 is only just about to come out of beta. And Microsoft also faces the dilemma of how much to allow its cloud version to compete with the standalone Office app.