Google Apps – Not only for customers who want to replace MS Office anymore

Earlier today, Google announced a new product called “Outlook Sync” an outlook add-on that lets organizations use Outlook as their main email client while connecting it to Google Apps in the back-end instead of Microsoft Exchange.

Some people might be surprised by such a move, after all Google has its own productivity suite – Google Docs, so why endorse MS Office?

When you think about Google’s mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible” (both in the consumer and enterprise space) you start realizing that Google does not share the same vision as Microsoft around building tools for the sake of the tools themselves, but rather focuses on the data organization and accessibility whereas the tools are just ways to help achieve that goal. So...if those tools happen to be MS Office or Outlook then Google will make sure to leverage that.

By using the Outlook sync product, users will start managing and organizing their emails, contacts and calendar items on Google Apps, this means that the Google platform will kick in to start helping users organizing their information, archiving it, making it accessible through Google search, on the web and so much more….

OffiSync for Microsoft Office aligns with the same strategy. Google built an integration with Outlook and OffiSync extends that to Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The goal for OffiSync was to connect those MS Office applications to Google Apps and Google Docs and let users save their MS Office files on the Google back-end so they can access them from any computer, collaborate with others and organize it on Google’s platform.

The idea behind OffiSync

The idea to build OffiSync came to me when I was told that many Google Docs and Google Apps users also use Microsoft Office.

I decided to learn more about why would people use both products at the same time? Why not switch from the expensive Microsoft Office to the free / Cheap Google Docs / Google Apps alternative?

So I started asking around, I talked to a Gartner analyst, a general manager in a fortune 500 company, a good friend that is a CEO of a start up company and about a dozen other users who all gave me more or less the same answer:

“We like using Office for content creation and editing, but then, when we need to collaborate with others we upload the document to Google Docs so we can work with others and see changes and edits in real time. We also like keeping the files online so we can access them when we are not in front of our own computer"

So I decided to try it myself and do the same. It is then that I realized 2 very important facts:
- Google Docs is an amazing service
- Working with Office and Google docs in the scenario mentioned above seemed to almost be impossible and was very cumbersome. It took so much time to take a file I created in PowerPoint or Word and make it available online so I could collaborate with my co-workers....

So being an adventurous person, I decided to solve the problem for myself and for all those who use both Microsoft Office and Google docs and started OffiSync.

The idea we had when we started was very simple: enable users to keep using the leading desktop productivity suite, MS Office, and super charge it with the online and collaborative power of Google. We envisioned the integration between Office and Google Docs to feel very natural and almost as if they came from the same vendor.

So that's what we did....

Once you install OffiSync, you will get a tight integration between Office and Google Docs that will help you do the following:

* Save your Office files on Google docs just as if you were saving them locally. From that moment, you can access them from any computer using the browser only OR use Office to access those files when you use your own computer, just as if they were stored locally
* Use Google Search, integrated into the OffiSync toolbar, to find your documents in seconds (I love this feature!! )
* Share and collaborate with others by combining Office and Google Docs collaboration features. OffiSync will let you save a document online and add collaborators right from within the Office toolbar.


But then I started thinking, why stop here, why not build more “google features into MS Office” and that became the longer term plan for this product. We are now working to put more Google features such as Google maps integration, Google images and Google App Engine to make some magic with Office.

Let us know what you think! contact@offisync.com

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