Live Documents To Take on Google Docs and Microsoft Office
Sabeer Bhatia, who sold Hotmail to Microsoft in 1997 for around $400 million, has now challenged the cash cow (read Office Suite) of the same company that made him a millionaire.
Sabeer has launched Office Live Documents - an online+offline Office suite of programs similar to Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
Like Zoho Office or Google Docs, Live Documents lets you create, edit and share Office documents in the web browser.
All your edits are automatically synchronized with all other copies of the documents.
And if you own a copy of Microsoft Office, you can download a Live Documents toolbar desktop client that makes it easy to upload documents from your Office programs to the Live Documents cloud (very similar to Office Live Workspace).
Other than uploading documents online, this Live Docs desktop client will also synchronizes all changes made to a document - either on the browser or on the desktop within Microsoft Office - to ensure that the most up-to-date document is available on both platforms.
Live Documents is done in Flex so should work on any system that has the Flash plug-in. Overall, Live Docs sounds like a good concept but they are definitely up against some heavyweights notably Google and Microsoft.
Request invite for Live Documents here. Official site: live-documents.com
Subscribe in a reader
it looks like this officelive thing is made by Microsoft….
Amit,
Thank you for covering Live Documents.
Just to clarify on a couple of points that you made - our desktop client is not just a mechanism to upload documents to the cloud - it actually converts Microsoft Office into a collaborative platform and synchronizes all changes made to a document - either on the browser or on the desktop within Microsoft Office - to ensure that the most up-to-date document is available on both platforms. So without having to import or export documents, you have access to all changes made to it by anybody with whom it is shared.
The client also facilitates offline access to your documents - any changes made in offline mode are synced back to the server the next time you go online- this is a big gap that neither Google or Zoho addresses since both solutions require internet connectivity to access your documents.
So, our approach on this is quite different from what Google or Zoho has done - while they offer a pure browser-based service, we give users the choice and flexibility to work on and share their documents on the browser or on the desktop…we would like to think of it as a hybrid model.
Thanks once again for writing about us.
Cheers,
Sumanth Raghavendra
For the Live Documents team
With competition from people with deep pocket MNC’s I don’t know a non revenue model would be how helpful to the guy.
Thanks for the update Sumanth - the original article has been updated based on your feedback.
I think Zoho also offers a free Office add-in that provides offline access to documents stored in your Zoho account.
You can download an existing document from Zoho Office, edit it offline with Microsoft Word and then publish it to the cloud when your are online again.
But again, I am not sure if Zoho addin provides synchronization features as available inside Live Docs.
Good luck. Am still waiting for a beta invite.
Ha, Last time MS bought out his venture and I think this time Google will! Hail Sabeer Bhatia!
Amit: Thanks for the clarification regarding Zoho’s online/offline syncing capabilities!
Zoho Writer also has the Google Gears integration. We are coming out with offline editing/syncing capabilities very shortly and that will ensure that you don’t need the costly desktop software package for working offline.
MS already having their online and offline suite can easily bring a more tightly coupled sync patch and still pose a tough competition. Waiting for an invite to check what Live Documents has that the already famous and fanned Zoho or Google Office suite doesnt have. :)