Up until recently Docs had several disadvantages in comparison to its main competitor Google Docs. It was for instance not possible to upload and read pdf documents.

Yesterday’s announcement at the Docs blog revealed several feature additions to Docs.com, among them support for PDF files. Docs users can now upload pdf documents to Docs to read and share them online.

But, this only works on computer systems with Sliverlight 4 installed. If you never heard of it, Silverlight is Microsoft’s Flash competitor. Interested users who want to get an impression of the rendering quality can take a look at this example pdf document at Docs.

Silverlight is currently only officially available for Mac and PC, which means that Linux users will not be able to to use the pdf reading part of the service. (maybe it is possible with Mono or another project, let us know)

But pdf document support is not the only new feature of Docs.com. The Docs search has been revamped, now offering full text search with a social component. Social component, huh? Remember the news that Bing has started to integrate social elements into their search engine? That you for instance see movie likes of your friends if you search for movies?

This is apparently something similar, probably using much of the same technology. But first things first.

The full text search is now able to find the search phrase in documents and tags. Previously, Docs search was only matching tags with the search phrase. A big improvement.

The social component is integrated into the document ranking algorithm. Docs.com uses social criteria, like the searchers relationship with authors or the number of likes of a document, to rank documents in the search results.

Another addition is the user-generated templates feature. This allows friends to copy a document to their space, and edit it there, instead of allowing them to edit the document in your space.

Now, in the new ‘advanced options’ section of the sharing control you may specify if “Viewers can use the doc as a template.” If you select this option, your friends can make their own copy with a single click.

Lastly, Docs.com is now making use of a bulk Silverlight document uploader. Users can now upload multiple documents at once by dragging and dropping them on the uploader. This feature again is only available to Silverlight 4 users.

You can read the full announcement here or visit Docs right away.

The software program will display the personal documents upon startup. Personal documents are those found in the user’s My Documents folder of the Windows operating system. It will list all documents with their names, modification dates, owners and directories they are stored in.

The documents can be sorted by the same parameters and opened by double-clicking them. A search form on top makes it possible to search for documents containing the search term in their title. It is currently not possible to search the document’s contents as well.

A click on the context pulldown menu makes it possible to change the view to display everyone’s documents, program files or the internet cache instead. The same options apply to these selections as well. Doc Update is available in an early version which might be the reason for the lack of information. The program does take relatively long to display the documents in the table as well. The program might already be useful for some users who need to keep track of document updates made by co-workers.

A letter that has been send out by the Google Docs team seems to have made the worst case scenario true for some users of the online service. According to Techcrunch who received a copy of a letter that has been send out the following happened: The Google Docs team identified a bug in their online service that may have caused the sharing of documents without the knowledge or permission of the user.

“This inadvertent sharing was limited to people with whom you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document. The issue only occurred if you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, selected multiple documents and presentations from the documents list and changed the sharing permissions. This issue affected documents and presentations, but not spreadsheets.”

While it is unclear as to how many users have actually been affected by the bug it does outline the problems of storing documents, files and information on the Internet. There is always a chance that the documents will fall into hands that they are not intended for.

Anyway I don’t actually mean to right off Google Docs, I use it myself all the time, however for very different purposes then what I use MS Office for.

Google rolls out new features every few months or so, and the latest is a welcome addition to the online office suite… templates.

I’ve actually wanted this feature for quite some time and although there has been the ability to style documents with CSS, I can’t be bothered with that, I wanted some templates like Office.

Now when you click New in the Docs menu you can select “From Template” and choose from hundreds of spreadsheet, presentations and document templates.

The document selection is actually very good and there is a lot of great professional looking templates as well as the usual letter/resume style personal documents. The Presentation templates are a bit simpler then what you could find in Powerpoint, but good enough. Lastly the spreadsheet templates are very useful and there are a whole lot of invoice/financial ones.

It will be interesting to see what Google rolls out next. Office Live, Microsoft’s answer, is just too slow for me to use at the moment, but Google Docs is not good enough to use all the time.

All you need to do is enter your email address, your password and off you go, you can even get it to place a menu entry into the right-click menu, so you can upload things on the fly. Ok-ok, so why is it more than meets the eye?

The reason I think this is so awesome is that this app is just a sample of what you can do with the Google Api. You can find this app in the articles and tutorials section in the Google Code FAQ, and they have a very extensive and helpful article on the subject. Apart from letting you get to know the uploader, it shows you how to modify the code, how to create balloon tooltips, system tray apps, and a whole host of features.

Google is earning more and more respect in my eyes (it already has a lot) with these new steps they are taking. A few years back we would never have dreamed about this, can you imagine Microsoft creating a public api for anything? Well perhaps in time they will, all thanks to Google, Cheers!

The more flashy update is the ability to embed your GoogleDocs presentations into any webpage. It works much like the YouTube videos, where you can embed your own video, or even someone else’s if you copy-paste the embed link.

The technology looks and feels much the same, you can click on menu and you’ll find the embed link, along with a link to view the presentation in full glory on the Google Docs page. I think it still needs a bit of polishing, especially on the looks side, but at least they’re listening to their users. This may not be the most beautiful update, but it’s usable and works.