With offerings such as Office Web Apps and Office 365, Microsoft is exploring Cloud productivity scenarios, but at the same time, the company is also leveraging social networking for its online productivity offering tied to Facebook, namely Docs.com.
Pat Kinsel from Microsoft’s FUSE Labs reveals that by introducing support for Facebook groups in Docs.com, the software giant made a giant step forward in terms of social productivity.
The feature was added in response to feedback from users that asked to be able to easily share Docs.com content not only with individual Facebook members but also with groups of friends.
And in fact, this is what support for Facebook is all about, making the experience of sharing Docs.com documents as simple as possible.
FUSE Labs worked with Facebook to integrate Groups functionality into Docs.com. Kinsel explains that this was possible by leveraging a set of application programing interfaces (APIs) provided by the social network precisely so that third-party applications can also embrace Groups.
“Docs.com extends Facebook Groups in many ways.
- Easily share Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF files with a Group.
- Collaborate together by inviting fellow group members to either view and/or edit your documents. For example, I’ve asked my ‘Cosmos’ friends to review my wedding guest list.
- You can take advantage of this new feature, even if you don’t have Microsoft Office installed on your computer by utilizing our Microsoft Office Web Apps via Docs.com.”
Most importantly, users continue to retain control over the content they choose to share over Docs.com with their Facebook friends.
Members of the social network can easily view and/or edit permissions in the context of either a set of friends, all the friends, or a specific Facebook group.
At the same time, a document can be shared with everyone making it public, or kept completely private.
“Docs.com’s support for Facebook Groups is easy and intuitive. Now, in the sharing control, you can select a Group to either view and/or edit your doc,” Kinsel said.
“This will post a Facebook newsfeed story to that Group’s Wall on Facebook.com. It will also broadcast to each of the group members’ home newsfeeds.
“Any of these friends can simply click the doc and they can either view and/or edit it. And, of course, people can comment on the document within the Facebook newsfeed and beside the document itself.”
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