Looking For New Ways to Share (And Laziness Marches On)

I do a lot of collaborative writing. Back when the world was young, my tech solutions of choice were private FTP servers or shared folders on a network. These days the hobbyist writer and her co-authors are better served by dynamic, web-spanning, free services like DropBox or Google Docs.

Gone are the days of endless e-mail attachments with incremental yet important revisions and the nightmare of enforcing naming conventions. The other day I stumbled upon (literally, with my StumbleUpon button) a nifty add-on for Microsoft Office-Google Docs interoperability called OfficeSync.

I'm not convinced that OfficeSync will revolutionize the way I use Google Docs, but it is a huge convenience to open online documents right from Word's interface instead of groping for Firefox.

Downloading and displaying seemed to work seamlessly, but saving back to Google Docs wasn't so fortunate. The updates arrived on Google Docs, but only after it took so long to upload via Word that I wasn't sure if the process had hung or not. If any of my associates want to give this a try, we can probe the perimeters of usefulness for people who aren't me - i.e., those who don't install cool but impractical add-ons like mouse gestures simply because they *can*.

Technical stuff:
OfficeSync requires Microsoft Office 2003 or 2007 and, obviously, a Google account.

We'll discuss the potential consequences of handing over precious data to a corporate entity in another post.