Google's Cloud Connect to save Microsoft Office works automatically

Google's Cloud Connect to save Microsoft Office works automatically

NEW DELHI: Each time you open a new Word file in Microsoft Word, from now on, there won't be any need to save your work every few seconds, for fear of losing all your data with a power cut or a computer hang. Google's newly launched Cloud Connect toolbar for Microsoft apps, sits inside a MS Word, Excel, or Powerpoint application.

Available for free download, the toolbar enables users to directly save their MS Office work into Google's server farms located all over the world, from any device. Google's strategy to embed its apps inside MS Office suite, which forms almost a third of its $62 billion annual sales will be a direct hit into Microsoft's prime bread source after Windows, if successful.

Once logged in to a Google account, the toolbar automatically keeps saving any document being currently worked upon on to a Google server farm. The catch is that your PC should once in a while be connected to the internet, to get it synced with the cloud.

"We will keep documents on the cloud till eternity for a user, as long as his or her Google account is active," Shan Sinha, Product Manager, Google Apps told ET from Google's Mountain View headquarters. Won't saving a large amount of private documents of users, create legal issues for Google? "All documents are stored in an encrypted fashion, and only people with the document's weblink would be allowed to view or edit," he says.

The Cloud Connect initiative by Google is a step ahead of its Docs offering, which failed to pick up enthusiasm in many markets, as people are still hooked on to MS Office applications. Microsoft holds almost 90% market share in Office applications. The advantadge Cloud Connect toolbar offers users is that, once synced, all MS Office data sitting in a home or office PC, can be accessed from anywhere in the world through iPads, smartphones or PCs.

" It's a conversion strategy, get people hooked on the capability so that they move completely to Google Apps and stop paying for two licenses (one Microsoft, one Google)," says Forrester analyst TJ Keitt.

Microsoft's Office applications generates a Google weblink for each document saved on Google's servers, once embedded with a toolbar. For groups, wanting to share work, Cloud Connect offers collaborative editing. All revisions by each user of the document is saved.