OneDrive to Rule Them All

onedrive

Everybody loves Dropbox, right?  Whether you discovered it in college or a colleague got you using it to help coordinate “work from home” efforts, it made document synronization a breeze.  It’s not bad for sharing documents, either..  Unless you’re trying to collaborate.

That’s part of why everybody loves Google Docs, right?  The ability to open up a word processing or spreadsheet document in your browser and collaborate in real time really upped the ante. Wave was a bit of a joke, but it gave Google the tools it needed to succeed with allowing multiple people to communicate and edit a single document.  The problem is, creating really nice documents with all of the bells and whistles just isn’t feasible in Google’s limited environment.

Enter, Microsoft.  Yes, I’m talking about the folks who’ve developed Office and turned it into the behemoth that it is.  It’s a behemoth because it’s evolved to the needs of its users and is as powerful as ever.  Take it a step further, and truly integrate the web, and you have OneDrive – Microsoft’s answer not only to Dropbox, but also to Google Docs.  The ability to sync documents, share documents, and collaborate is here, and it’s great.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not giving up on Dropbox or Google Docs (notice… iCloud isn’t even part of this conversation), but right now, Microsoft has a really good answer to the collaborative document problem.  If you haven’t checked it out yet, I highly urge that you do.  You get a ton of free storage space, and free access to the online version of Office software – which kicks the ass of Google’s online offerings, so far as document / productivity software goes.

And yes, of course, it’s multi-platform.  I’m typing this up from my MacBook, where I just installed the OneDrive app from the App Store.