There is a swish new tool out there that enables you to work on your Google docs from within Microsoft Office applications. It goes by the name of OffiSync and is available here:

Download OffiSync

Check out the OffiSync demo:

The presenter makes a point of emphasising that this is only the first version of the application, so I think there’s a high probability that functionality will change in the near future.

Installing OffiSync adds a new toolbar to your Microsoft Office applications.

The slogan seems to be

Save your files online and access them from any computer

but Google Docs already gives you that benefit! To be fair, it’s Google Docs that offers this collaborative feature and OffiSync provides the integration between Microsoft Office and Google Docs. That’s not to take anything away from the usefulness of such a tool though.

When saving the Office document locally (i.e. on your hard drive), a version gets saved online too. Every change made to the local version of the document also updates the online version automatically so there are no synchronisation issues. I could be wrong, but this utility seems to allow you to move around files that are stored “in the cloud”.

Collaborate With OffiSync

One of the major benefits that Google Docs gives you is the ability to collaborate with friends and colleagues. OffiSync brings this ability to share documents within Microsoft Office. You actually add the emails of your collaborators in a window that opens within Office. You also get the option to send a personalised message to the recipients containing a link to the online document.

Collaborators can be maintained from the new toolbar. You can add new ones, delete existing ones and also change permission settings here.

Two collaborators can work on the same shared document simultaneously and see each others’ changes in realtime.

OffiSync also makes it easy to communicate with coworkers by providing a convenient email facility, again within Office.

Synchronising Documents

Something that puzzles me is how documents changed online will update the versions stored locally. Presumably there is a link to a URL stored somewhere within the Office document and some kind of synchronisation takes place when the locally stored document is opened.

Tags | collaborate, Google Docs, integration