Google launches office collaboration tools

Online Docs & Spreadsheets will help teams collaborate on documents

Google has released, in beta, Docs & Spreadsheets, an online collaborative office productivity tools suite.

Announced at the Office 2.0 event in San Francisco, Docs & Spreadsheets is a marriage of the document-creation tools - accrued with the purchase of Writely - and Google’s own Spreadsheet service. In a statement Google called it an answer to “collaborative and document-management challenges”.

With a Google account and a web browser, teams will be able to work together on documents, manage the progress of events, and publish them to a blog or web site, in a single browser-based product.

In tests we found the system easy to use and replete with all the necessary word processing features. Additional functionality, such as the ability to add links via hypertext, made posting to the internet simple and straightforward. Teams working in a group have a shared view of the documents and spreadsheets, and can prioritise and organise them.

Tags can be added to documents, making searching across items for specific terms a lot simpler. Google Docs & Spreadsheets is currently in beta, available for free, and open for sign-ups.

The release follows the announcement that Google is to buy online video site YouTube for some $1.65bn, and comes at a time when analysts are predicting that one or two huge players could dominate the online marketplace.

Dave Tansley, technology partner at Deloitte, predicted more merger and acquisition activity, saying that it gave online firms, “additional revenue streams… the potential to sell in secondary products, like VoIP and storage… and additional branding and profile opportunities.”

At the Gartner Symposium in Orlando last week, analyst Hung LeHong talked of a "Googazon" – a merged entity of web giants Google and Amazon and said, “it’s a scary scenario. A few major players could take over Web 2.0.”