Oftentimes, the biggest bother of testing a new software product is the cumbersome login process. And if you dont already have a login, you have to go through the excruciating registration process, which may last all of 60 seconds, but you would do anything to get around.

Google just saved you that, and made trying Google Docs super simple!

All you need to do is visit the demo page of Google Docs (http://docs.google.com/demo/) and have a document open in front of you, which you can start typing in right away. That's SIMPLE in capital letters. Click on that link and see for yourself.

If you want to collaborate in real time with others, you need to just share the link with others, and you can all be typing in the same document real time. That's as cool as cool gets.

But although testing Google Docs got easier, the fact remains that it may not appeal to others that are used to the more powerful authoring features of Microsoft Office. Upgrading to Office 2010 is an option for people who want Office AND co-authoring.

If you have older versions of MS Office (2007, 2003) worry not, you can use an online document manager like HyperOffice. 

Microsoft finally brought Office 2010 out of a 5 month beta, which saw 8 million users testing it. Office 2010 includes MS Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote. Although there aren't any groundbreaking changes over Office 2010 - Office 2010 retains the ribbon task bar from Office 2007 which didn't prove to be much of a success. But it brings certain cool features which reflects a great need to collaborate amongst teams of today. One of these features is real time "co authoring" which lets users to work together on the same document and "merge" changes.

But one of the most looked out for aspects of Office 2010 is Office Web Apps - the web version of MS office documents. Office Web Apps were launched in obvious response to the growing importance of GoogleDocs in the business market. Users can access, edit and collaborate on documents right from their browser.

Office Web Apps, which are expected to come soon, will be available to consumers for free through their SkyDrive accounts.  For business users, there are two options, either they can access Office Web Apps through a server based install of SharePoint 2010, or through their subscription of Office Live Services. 

Should you upgrade or not? That is a question which calls for a detailed analysis in itself. For now, if you don;t want to upgrade, theres no need to worry, you can use an online document management system to collaborate on Office 2007, 2003 or 2000 files. 

A few days ago, Google Docs announced a number of new features, evidently in response to the looming launch of Office Web Apps, the web version of MS Office.

1. New Document and Spreadsheet features: Docs now supports little things, like a margin ruler, better numbering and bullets, and more flexible image placement. Meanwhile, Spreadsheets now come with a formula editing bar, cell auto-complete, and drag-and-drop columns.
2. Higher fidelity document import: Google claims imported documents now keep more of their original structure, meaning less inconvenient tinkering.
3. Speed: With faster architecture, Google says there's much less lag when working with large spreadsheets. 
4. New Collaboration Features. The feature which is grabbing the most attention, however, is the ability of upto 50 users to collaborate in real time, with different color coding differentiating between different collaborators. 

However, all of these few features are coming at a price. Google Docs plans to drop offline support as of May, and it may be down for a while. This will be a great inconvenience for people who are outside the range of a wi-fi, traveling by place etc and want to work on documents even when they don't have internet access.  

For those who consider this to be a major turnoff, it may be better to continue to use a desktop based processing application like MS Word, and use a document management solution like HyperOffice, which works best with traditional file types. 

Long months of speculation about Google launching a revolutionary "GDrive" online storage service were brought to an end, in somewhat of a dampner, when Google announced that it was adding storage capabilities to its Google Docs service. This new service, the basic version of which is free, allows users to store "an file type" to their Google Docs account. The basic service is free, and storage can be extended for a price.

Rather than being a disruptive offering in the online storage market, this new development seems to be more targeted towards business users of Google Apps, or the business collaboration software market in general, who want to store and collaborate on common file types, and not just the online Google formats that Google Docs supports. In recent times, as a recent HyperOffice blog entry on Google Apps revealed, Google has been making concessions on its "purely online" approach and offering support for popular traditional software - MS Office, MS Outlook etc.

However, although Google has touted the word "collaboration" in its announcements, the new feature just allows users to store and access files from their Google Docs account but not collaborate on them. Features like versioning, notifications, audit trails etc are missing, which exist in existing online document management offerings.

A few days ago, HyperOffice announced the private beta release of a mega upgrade to its award winning HyperOffice online collaboration software. Although HyperOffice periodically releases upgrades to its suite (it has added wikis, full document search, online database tools in the last 4 months) the latest upgrade rebuilds the suite ground up in AJAX, incorporating two years of R and D with users. 

The launch has received a lot of traction from the tech media, and the upgraded HyperOffice is being seen as a major competitor to Google Apps and solutions from IBM. The new version promises the following:-

The suite:

1. Gives newly-minted entrepreneurs the software tools and support services they need to quickly launch new ventures from any web-connected computer or mobile device, including the Apple iPhone;
2. Gives smaller and mid-sized companies the power to compete and expand -- without the hassles of buying, installing, upgrading and fixing hardware and software;
3. Speeds up time to market for agile business units – even if corporate IT resources are limited or non-existent;
4. Cuts across boundaries of time, place and organization to connect mobile workers and distributed teams with colleagues, business partners and contractors – from work, from home, while traveling, anytime, using any Internet connection. 

The suite is amongst the only solutions to bring collaboration and productivity tools integrated in a single solution - email, calendars, intranet and extranet workspaces, document management, forums, project management, workflows, database tools and online meetings. As emphasized by Shahab Kaviani, VP Marketing of HyperOffice, there are various other web 2.0 tools which bring a single piece of the puzzle - calendars, or task management, or document management etc, resulting in productivity as data is kept in the silos of different solutions. HyperOffice, in bringing all tools within the same solution, results in synergies from data flowing between different tools. 

Check out a video of the new version:-