Thread: Google Docs Goes Offline

GOOGLE DOCS IS adding a key feature that makes it a true competitor to Micro¬soft Office: omine access. It's promising, but the early beta I tested had limitations.

The omine version relies on Google Gears, an omine syncing technology; once you've installed Gears on your PC, Docs syncs your documents between its serv¬ers and your browser. There after, you can access docs. google.com omine, and all changes that you make to documents are saved when you reconnect. That's the theory, at least.



My changes never made it to Google's servers; I could see my edits when I viewed the document in IE on my own PC, but on other browsers and other PCs, the changes vanished. When I tried again on yet another PC, though, everything worked fine. It's early days yet obviously, but these problems should be fixed quickly.

The omine tools are rather limited: You can't create a new document, view a document's revision history, alter the style, insert photos, or check your spelling. It's best suited for editing documents you've already creat ed, and power users are going to want to stay away for the moment. Google needs to do some polishing to make this work seamlessly; but once it does, it could be a great tool.