IBM Docs

Almost a year ago, IBM promised to launch its own alternative to Google Docs and Office 365 - LotusLive Symphony. And the company has fulfilled the promise. True, the service is called differently - IBM Docs and for now it has no relation to the SaaS-platform LotusLive. IBM Docs is now in Beta the status and located on the strange portal Lotus GreenHouse. It's strange because, first, why it's Green, while the company is Blue? And second, IBM doesn't clearly explain the purpose of this portal and how long it will exist. It provides several IBM services for free, including Lotus Connections, Lotus Quickr, Lotus Sametime, Lotus iNotes. Moreover, the portal has less restrictions than bugs. But let's get back to the IBM Docs.

Unlike the Google Wave team, nobody disturbs Google Docs developers, so they continue to add useful and not useful features to the suite. This time they changed the Google Docs interface in order to help users more easily manage lists of documents. They added a right pane with preview of the selected document and relevant information about it: history, versions and users who have access to it. The new Google Docs homepage now shows the most frequently used documents (an extension of the GMail Priority Inbox idea). The list of documents can be filtered by file type or you can show only images / videos (they are be displayed as thumbnails). For images the new slideshow-viewer has been added: