After a scheduled maintenance session today, I logged back into Writely only to find myself redirected to the new joint application called Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google's more clear move into revealing a full online office suite of services.
Don't expect too much - it's still essentially two different services behind one combined user interface. I have to admit the merge thus far has been pretty seamless, giving the user one location to find all their documents and spreadsheets. Tagging works for both formats so you can now search your files regardless of whether it is a spreadsheet or a document. The same goes for the starring system.
Collaboration is still disjoint - something that Google commits to work on in the coming months. This means that you still have the Writely options of one-by-one uploads using the website or direct email uploads of multiple files as apart from the Google Spreadsheets sharing option that needs for you to be within the spreadsheet itself in order to enable sharing and collaboration.
The same goes for the chat feature amongst collaborators which is only available for spreadsheets but not when you're editing documents.
Still, I and many others watching the development of the rumored "Google Office" are definitely excited about this development. Google really seems to be pushing ahead this quarter in a very aggressive series of moves and announcements, clearly showing why they sit on over $10 billion as a company.
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