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 difficult part begins to combine and make use of that feedback without loosing control. If you do that in Microsoft Word or any other desktop text editor you will most likely wind up with multiple documents opened in tabs or windows trying desperately to align them comfortably.

Text Flow is an online collaboration software using Adobe Flash and Adobe Air that allows the user to compare and display multiple versions of a document online. With Text Flow it is just a matter of dragging and dropping the documents into the interface to visualize all comments and changes made by other authors who worked with the document.

Check out the Text Flow online demo to see how the system works.

There are obviously other ways to handle the problem of receiving feedback from multiple colleagues. If time is not a issue you could make the colleagues work on one document only that gets send to each of them successively.

Other services like Google Docs offer basic collaboration features but they are not always allowed to use depending on the company you work for.