Introducing Docs for Facebook

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced a great partnership between Microsoft and Facebook this morning at Facebook’s f8 developer conference.  Mark highlighted the launch of a beta of a new service that allows Facebook users to create and share Microsoft Office documents (Word, PowerPoint, Excel) directly with their friends (or the world if they choose) on Facebook.  The partnership brings together an app we call Docs and a new site, Docs.com, which seamlessly integrate with Facebook.

The folks at Microsoft’s Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Labs are the team behind this and team lead Lili Cheng has a blog post  introducing the new service and talking about how this is part of Ray Ozzie’s vision for social productivity.  Our colleagues at Channel 9 have a video interview with Lily and some demos.  If you want to know more you can visit http://www.docs.com/ for registration info. (Note that while everyone can see and comment on documents, initially a smaller number of people will be able to upload documents while we get the service to scale).

Updated: Channel 9 posted a great interview with Lili Cheng demoing the Docs app.

And the FUSE Labs team also has a “welcome to Docs” video, as well as a “getting started” video. Worth watching if you want to know more.

This is just one of the ways we think about combining the power of social with the familiarity and functionality of Microsoft Office.

Posted by Dominic Carr
Director, Microsoft News Center.

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