Docs.com is a collaboration between Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 FUSE Labs

FUSE Labs

Microsoft's Future Social Experiences Labs was started by Ray Ozzie and is run by Lili Cheng. The group focuses on real-time and media rich experiences and is located in Redmond, WA, Cambridge, MA, and Cambridge, UK....

 and Facebook

Facebook

Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...

 to provide a basic online document editing suite, similar to Google Docs. It is designed to make it easy to discover, create and share Office documents with your Facebook friends. It was announced and officially launched during Facebook f8 conference on April 21, 2010 by Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is an American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur. He is best known for co-creating the social networking site Facebook, of which he is chief executive and president...

..

Overview

Docs.com currently offers the capability to upload or create new Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents. Users may edit documents online even if they do not have Office installed. However, the docs.com web editors integrate with Office so that users may edit documents on their PC or Mac and save them directly back to the cloud.

Docs.com is targeting individual users (e.g. students). A similar offering from Microsoft Office Live

Microsoft Office Live

Microsoft Office Live is a discontinued web-based service providing document sharing and website creation tools for consumers and small businesses...

 is directed at business customers.

Technical details

Docs.com leverages Facebook Connect for user authentication. Furthermore, the service is modeled after the Facebook Photos application and uses similar sharing settings so that users may easily invite their friends to either view or edit their documents.

Docs.com integrates into the Facebook UI much like photos by providing a homepage within Facebook , a profile tab, and by posting documents to a user's Facebook Wall.

The service is built using Microsoft's Office Web Apps

Office Web Apps

Microsoft Office Web Apps is a web-based version of the Microsoft Office productivity suite. It includes the web-based versions of Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Microsoft OneNote. The web applications allow users to access their documents directly from anywhere within a...

 and is compatible with the major browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome.

Support for Facebook pages

Docs.com announced support for Facebook pages on July, 8 2010.

Facebook page administrators have a shared folder where they may upload, create and edit shared documents. Documents can easily be posted to a Facebook page for the page's fans to view. Learn how the functionality works or how it was built.

Beta availability

Docs.com is currently in beta and is open to any Facebook user.

Docs.com graduated from closed to open beta on July 1, 2010.

External links

• Docs.com
• Docs.com announced by Mark Zuckerberg
  Mark Zuckerberg
  Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is an American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur. He is best known for co-creating the social networking site Facebook, of which he is chief executive and president...
  
  , Lili Cheng and Pat Kinsel
• Introducing Docs for Facebook Channel 9 (discussion forum) Video with Lili Cheng and Pat Kinsel
• Microsoft's Facebook Experiment
• Docs.com support for Facebook pages: View How or Learn More
• First Look at Docs.com by ZDnet
  ZDNet
  ZDNet is a business technology news website published by CBS Interactive, along with TechRepublic and SmartPlanet. The brand was founded on April 1, 1991 as a general interest technology portal from Ziff Davis and evolved into an enterprise IT-focused online publication owned by CNET...
  
  
• "Early screen shots of Docs.com on WebScanNotes"