Google Presentation just another ‘Docs’ feature

Google’s planned presentation application will be just another feature of the Google Docs application, Rajen Sheth, product manager for Google Enterprise Applications told InfoWorld.

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Rather than appearing as a separate application within the Google Apps suite, the new Google presentation features will be just another feature, along side the document and spreadsheet features that are accessed by clicking on Documents within the Google desktop environment, he said.

“What you’ll see is similar to something like Google Docs. In terms of naming and branding, the way we look at it is as a feature of Google Docs and Spreadsheets,” Sheth said.

That decision is consistent with the approach Google took when it unveiled its Docs and Spreadsheets features in February, 2006. Rather than treat each application separately, as Microsoft Office does, Google combines them within a user environment built around collaboration and online sharing.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt unveiled plans for the new application yesterday at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. The application, which will use technology Google recently acquired from Tonic Systems, a Java-based presentation software firm with offices in the Bay Area and Melbourne, Australia.

Google is still developing the product and can’t say yet what the core features will be when it is unveiled this summer. The company is also trying to figure out exactly what role the Tonic technology will play in the final product, Sheth said.

“They have a lot of expertise in presentation file formats and presentation software in general. They’re going to be adding that expertise into the mix here and that will,in the end, make it a better product,” he said.

While CEO Schmidt was greeted with skepticism if not outright laughter when he tried to suggest that Google wasn’t trying to take on Microsoft and its Office franchise, Sheth confirmed his company’s view that comparing Office and Google Apps is like comparing apples (no pun intended) and oranges.

“I think a lot of traditional office tools were built on the notion of individual productivity — you built tools that were there to make one person on one PC very productive. What’s missing is team productivity — the ability to make it so that people working on things together can quickly publish and share information with coworkers or others outside the company or friends. Thats where this adds to it,” Sheth said.

In fact, “traditional office tools” as Sheth calls them (aka Office) only cover one fourth of what Google considers must have functionality: document creation. The other three fourths — collaboration, document publishing and retrieval (aka search) aren’t part of the traditional Office suite, but are central to Google’s vision.

“A lot of traditional office applications grew up in a world before the Internet was widely available. (Google) Apps have grown up in a world that’s based on the Internet. Because of that, the paradigms of how people work together are very different and things grow in different directions,” he said.

Though Google Apps was initially envisioned for small enterprises, Google is seeing traction even at large enterprises and Fortune 500 firms, which are warming to the software as a service (SaaS) concept, he said.

Recent stories, like the revelation that some public Google Calendars have been leaking sensitive scheduling information from brand name companies companies is just proof that there’s hunger in many large firms for the sharing and collaboration features that Google Apps offer, he said. (Noting that companies can keep confidential information from leaking out by using Google’s Apps suite, rather than the public calendaring feature.)

But Sheth ruled out a full fledged marketplace for Google Apps, akin to Salesforce.com’s successful AppExchange.

“Our strength is in end user collaboration applications. What Google is great at is connection to the end user. What we want to do is set a framework for how people can collaborate, but allow extensions to that framework so that customers can customize and collaborate in ways that are specific to their industry or applications,” he said.

For now, Google is happy with what it is seeing on forums like Google Gadgets, where third party developers can post their Google Desktop add-ons for download, and from its Google enterprise professional program.

As for the future, Sheth says anything is possible, given the rate of change in the tech community as Web 2.0 development and deployment paradigms take hold.

“The great thing about Web 2.0 and the development model on Web is that you can iterate things and get them out quickly … A year and a half ago, I could not have looked you in the eye and said that we’d have a viable spreadsheet program on the Web. The same thing will happen in the next couple years, we’re going to see things happen we can’t even anticipate happening today.”