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Google finally integrated Writely (acquired in march 2006) and Google Spreadsheets in what would probably become Google Office at some point - Google Docs & Spreadsheets (http://docs.google.com). supplementing those Google Apps released a few weeks ago, the online office suite is now almost complete, the last piece of the puzzle still missing being a presentation-module (and maybe a database/-collection tool similar to Dabble DB). Docs & Spreadsheets manages text-documents and sheets in one central place, giving users access to export-, tagging-, sharing- and collaboration-features.

while collaborative features and user interface are now aligned equal in both Docs and Spreadsheets, some obvious functionality like direct embedding of tables into docs isn’t implemented yet. on a side note: Google Docs can easily publish to common blogging-systems (MoveableType, MetaWeblog, Blogger…). considering spell checking and instant saving of documents, this could make Google Docs an interesting alternative blog-editor (in fact this post was written that way).

as of today, Google re-opened public access to their online word-processor Writely (via TechCrunch). beta-access was closed down to invitation-only after Writely’s aquisition earlier this year. from what I can see, there haven’t been any changes in functionality since my review a few weeks ago, which means that Writely continues to be probably the best online-app for word-processing. however it means also, that Writely is still far from replacing desktop-apps like Microsoft Word. this is mainly because of the extremely reduced featureset, leading to screw-ups when importing existing documents which go beyond minimalistic formatting. don’t believe me? at least now you can try it out yourself

first released august 2005, online text-processor Writely has been one of the first attempts of moving desktop-office-apps to the web. initial hype among web2.0-evangelists eventually peaked in an aquisition by Google in march 2006. since than, Writely kept quite stable (not to say stalled) - it hasn’t got any new major features, isn’t integrated with Google’s CI and other services, and still isn’t open to the public. if you are interested in trying out Writely, drop me a comment for an invitation.

word-processing features

Writely covers only basic text-formatting like font-styles, paragraph-alignment, bullets and enumerations. moreover it offers five paragraph-styles (header 1-3, Normal and Blockquote) which can’t be customized, effectively preventing the formatting of larger documents. there’s a table-editor, a spell-checker for english language and support for images and hyperlinks. all together the featureset is comparable to that of Zoho Writer (which means: it’s basically a WYSIWYG-blog-editor).

document management & collaboration

similar to GMail, Writely’s document manager allows to archive, ’star’ and tag files. documents emailed to a user-specific email-address (…@prod.writely.com) are automatically saved to the workspace, great for quickly importing loads of documents. import of Word-documents seems to work ok for simple files - problems occur when source-documents contain elements like headers or footers, which are currently not represented in Writely. documents can be exported to HTML, Word, OpenOffice, PDF and RTF, plus there even is a print-view.

the collaboration features work similar to Google Spreadsheets: after email-invitation, several users can edit documents simultaneously. the latency for synchronizing updates seems to be quite high though (>15 seconds), leading to mutual conflicts when a particular paragraph is edited by several users. the revision management (including revision-history, color-highlighting of each collaborateurs changes and RSS-feeds to track documents) emphasizes Writely’s aim at teams.

currenty Writely satisfies only very basic requirements for text-processing. if Google plans to further integrate their toolset (GMail, Calendar, Spreadsheets, Writely…), creating a lightweight web-office-suite, they will definitely have to improve each app’s featureset. at the moment I really can’t imagine using Writely for more than as an instant document-viewer on-the-go, the experience creating or editing documents just is too inferior. however, the collaboration-features are promising, leaving the question why Microsoft still hasn’t managed to extend their products in that direction (in a web-based way).