Live-Documents brings collaboration to Microsoft Office
By Vivek Puri | September 8th, 2006 at 10:46 am ET
Instacoll has released a powerful app Live-Documents that brings secure collaboration within Microsoft Applications. Instacoll is a Bangalore, India, based startup co-founded by Sabeer Bhatia of Hotmail fame.
Live-Documents has a pretty straight forward concept. Multiple users across different machines can share documents, make changes, and track those changes. Live-Documents supports Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. You need to install Live-Documents app on each of your machine to enable sharing and viewing of documents created using Live-Documents. Live-Document secures each document using a unique encryption key, the policy server records each key for the document, and an encrypted version of the document is saved on the disk that can be shared with other users. For each of the documents you can set up read, edit, print, and offline access rights per user basis. When a user finishes editing a document other users are notified about the changes. Live-Documents also provides real-time status of operations performed on a document like opening and printing. Live-Documents also provides a nifty front-end where you can change settings, view and edit contacts, view and assign tasks, and have discussions around documents.
Live-Documents is competing in an area dominated by Groove Networks, Google Writely (Word processing), and EditGrid (Spreadsheets). While Groove Networks also provides real time multi-user editing and sync capabilities of Microsoft Office documents, it is geared towards corporate clients, where Groove Server has to be part of infrastructure. But Groove networks app will be more tightly integrated with the release of Microsoft Office 2007, which will make life difficult for Live-Documents in corporate sector which seems to be the final aim.
For word editing, if you guys were thinking that Live-Documents will be a Google Writely killer app, you will be disappointed. What Live-Documents doesn’t have is multiple users editing the same document at the same time, which was perfected by Writely.com. In Live-Documents you hit the problem where documents get locked after one of the users starts editing it. Same is the case with Spreadsheets, where EditGrid allows multiple people to edit same spreadsheet at the same time, which you can do with Live-Documents. Both Writely and EditGrid also automatically maintain versions of documents for user convenience. Another advantage is that Writely and EditGrid are free apps and you don’t need worry about taking data backups(off course there are privacy concerns), or upgrading to new versions.
So where does Live-Documents stand in the grand Office 2.0 plan? For individual users, I think the preference will be: Writely+Editgrid=>Live-Documents=>Groove Networks. For corporate users preference will be in the order: Groove Networks=> Writely+Editgrid=> Live-Documents, provided Writely and EditGrid come out with Enterprise plans quickly that they have been talking about lately.
Links:
Live-Documents
Groove Networks
Writely
Editgrid
Tags: StartupSquad, web2.0, web_2.0, writely, editgrid, Office2.0, word, excel
on September 9th, 2006 at 10:48 pm
Hi,
Thank you for covering Live-Documents. Re: your point on real time co-editing like writely, we have InstaColl (www.instacoll.com) which provides users with real time co-editing from right with in MS Office (no need to upload your documents to a server).
From Live-Documents team.
on September 10th, 2006 at 7:26 am
Kaushal,
Thanks for your update. Well, I downloaded your app Instacoll and gave it a shot. I will say that it’s a nice try, but there are fundamental differences between Writely and Instacoll.
In the case of Install only one person has the edit rights, while rest of the people in the session only have view rights. If another user wants to make changes, the control has to be passed on to the new user. If changes made by a user are to be propagated to other users, the “Publish” button has to be used, which than pushed the changes to all users. So what this mean effectively is that Instacoll creates a copy of the document, which is than, put over the network, where control can be passed back and forth between uses who can than edit the document. I couldn’t find an option (if there is any), where 2 people can simultaneously edit a document. Similar is the case with Excel and PowerPoint doc editing.
But if you have a look at Writely, it works on different concept altogether. You can have many users editing the same document at the same time and all the changes made by the users are merged as and when they save. This is the best achievement in enhancing user collaboration that I have come across. Although it might look simple the way Writely works, but at the backend they have deployed at very smart and fault tolerant algorithm which does a 3 way diff and merge of text, including the html tags. Their code is able to detect addition, deletion, modification of text parts and even words, which is very difficult to achieve. After Writely gets the list of add/modify/delete of text for any particular user, they diff the text with the original version, which is the text that the user started off with, and the last saved version, which is the text saved by the last autosave, to come out with the latest last saved version. This last saved version is than pushed out to all users, who are than able to view changes in real-time.
As for the “Share Screen” functionality in Instacoll, that is great addition to the toolset but it will be competing with the likes off WebEx and GotoMeeting, which are very well established players. If Instacoll can offer your service at a price lower than them or free for individual users, there is definitely a chance for Instacoll.
Last thing I want to add is that I encountered few connectivity problems running Install where it was not able to auto-detect my Internet connection. Also, please provide more details about the Instacoll Firefox extension, which failed to install anyway.
-Vivek Puri
on November 4th, 2006 at 10:38 am
[…] Xcellery is another Web20 tool that makes collaboration around Microsoft Office documents easier. Currently supporting Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, users can create, edit and share their .xls files either using Xcellery online editor or using Microsoft Excel. Xcellery does offer features similar to EditGrid and Google Spreadsheets(GS), but does not want to be just another online spreadsheet editor. Xcellery team is trying to bridge the gap between the online and desktop world in similar way as InstaColl with web-based features. This does seem to be the right strategy for now ’cause of the bandwidth and browser related issues faced by EditGrid and GS users. […]
on March 19th, 2007 at 12:51 am
[…] Last month InstaColl had announced that it has raised undisclosed amount of funding from SoftBank Corp, Japan. InstaColl, which offers conferencing and collaboration solutions, is founded by Hotmail founder Sabeer Bhatia. Last year I had written about one of InstaColl’s product Live-Documents, that provides collaborative capabilities around Microsoft Applications. […]