The other day I wrote a blog titled “5 Things Wrong with Google Wave“. Now this blog wasn’t so much what was wrong with Google Wave, but rather it was about 5 things that Google needed to address before Google Wave is officially released. One of those “things” that needed to be addressed was the capability to collaborate on MS Office produced documents, given that 92% of businesses use MS Office and only 3.3 % use Google Docs (BTW, this post is being written on Google Docs). This post, coincidently, coincided with a recent new release from NetDocuments stating they were working on “developing an integration with Google Wave to simplify document collaboration and extend the NetDocuments collaborative reach to more people.”
So, I decided to contact NetDocuments and see if I could get a little more information on their integration effort with Google Wave and, also, find out a little more about the NetDocments product. More importanly, I wanted to know if this was a possible solution to the problem I posed. I spoke with Leonard Johnson the VP of Marketing for NetDocuments, who was great and answered a lot of questions and provided a lot of background information. Leonard was quick to add at the end of our conversation that anybody reading this post should feel free to contact him for further information, either by e-mail info@netdocuments.com or call +1.866.netdocs.
NetDocuments began in 1998 with a product they called Net Envelope which offered web-based document collaboration. This product has evolved to what is now know as Net Binder. What Net Binder provides today is a secure environment for businesses to collaborate on documents. Most importantly, MS Office documents including Outlook. As a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) content manger NetDocuments gives businesses the ability to collaborate on e-mails and documents securely. Leonard mentioned that this type of service is in great demand by many business, particularly the legal profession, which has a great deal of confidential or sensitive documents that they need to collaborate on together or send e-mails on a subject. I would assume that this type of service would be attractive to many businesses besides just the legal profession, but they certainly serve as a good example and one could think of many others (journalists, doctors, agents, etc, etc).
So back to Google Wave. NetDocuments attended Developer I/O 09 and held meetings with Google developers on how they could implement Google Wave into the NetDocuments product. What they envision being available is:
• Ability to create a wave within NetDocuments and display it as a separate object in a folder. It can also be embedded as an iFrame within a NetDocuments Project/Client-Centric Workspace allowing the wave contents to be visible when viewing the entire workspace.
• Ability to have NetDocuments folders, documents and search results displayed within a wave.
• Drag and drop documents from an internal NetDocuments folder to a wave, and vice versa.
• Login to the collaborative space using an methods that Google supports.
• Leverage the real-time wave collaborative features when it’s released to the market
The following are a few very early screenshots of the product:
NetDocuments released the news of an integration development path with Google at the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) 09. Normally, Leonard said the Law firms are slower at adopting new technology as they have very specific needs and are reluctant to change a working infrastructure. However, they were very impressed with the promise of a Google Wave integration and expressed real interest in the released solution.
Leonard said that he hoped that NetDocuments would be in the Google Wave sandbox by the end of this year. NetDocuments are waiting for a more stable version of the Wave to be released by Google before they can really do much more. They expect that more stable version by the end of September. The big issue that they have outstanding and need resolved is the authentication rights and whether they can re-authenticate.
In my mind this a great news for Google. This potentially solves a part of the problem they have of offering a MS Office solution to business. As I mentioned in “5 Things Wrong with Google Wave“, business will not like the idea that they now have to adopt Google Docs in order to use Google Wave. This provides one alternative, I think Google still needs to find a solution that is not web-based but this alternative I think will be wildly popular and could drive NetDocuments to create there own “NetDocuments server” that could be hosted by businesses and allow them to take provided an Intranet (NetDocuments + Google Wave) solution (purely speculation and conjecture on my part and not in NetDocuments plans that I know of).
I will be keeping a close eye on how this development progresses and really look forward to playing in the sandbox with a NetDocuments robot.
I would like to thank Leonard Johnson and NetDocuments for the great support they provided by finding time to do the interview and providing the great photos and background info.
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