Design for the web.

Around the office we’re pretty excited that Google is rolling out the Microsoft Office/Google Docs integration that they got with DocVerse a handful of months ago. Now you can install a toolbar that syncs your day-to-day life in Microsoft Word with the cloud that IT is always telling you to use.

Multiple people can edit the same document and have their changes synced with each save (hooray for the cloud). But because these changes aren’t reflected in real-time, there’s the potential for conflicts — I could edit a PowerPoint slide to say one thing, and my coworker could put something else on the same slide. Google deals with these conflicts by presenting users with an alert prompting them to choose which version they’d like to save; if they want to go back and switch again later, they can using the document’s version history.

Probably the biggest thing we see companies struggle with is syncing up versions of their documents so that everyone is on the same page [Editor's note: I bet more people struggle with printers... grumble]. The IT landscape is littered with SharePoint installations with sparse out of date content (if you need help making your SharePoint install more user friendly, I know a great little SharePoint team).

We usually recommend either DropBox or Google docs to small companies, so this might end up being one more tool in our standard toolbox.

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