DocVerse has been Googled!

I’m excited to tell you that DocVerse has officially been acquired by Google (click here for more)!  This is great news for our company, our team, and most of all, our users.

We started DocVerse nearly 3 years ago.  We believed strongly that the world of productivity and collaboration was changing.  The world started moving toward easy-to-use web applications, like Google Docs & Apps, offering a new way to work with all kinds of benefits.   However, for the many people who use desktop software, like Microsoft Office, transitioning to the cloud was a challenge.   Unfortunately, today, individuals are still forced to make a choice between those two worlds.  Even worse, teams who use both products find that Office and web applications do not play well together; most times, teams choose one product or the other.  Google’s acquisition of DocVerse represents a first step to solve these problems.

After launching a product that required us to solve a lot of hard problems, DocVerse grew quickly, signing up users and customers that included both small and large companies.   One of the most important things we learned in this time was that giving people choice is the best way to build products and give people what they want— the ability to work the way they want to.

What impresses us the most about the Google team is that they all share the same philosophy—giving people the tools to work the way they want.  From the moment we started talking with them, it was clear that there was a lot of shared DNA in how we approached solving people’s problems.  We fundamentally believe that Google is one of the best positioned companies to truly disrupt the world of productivity software.  We’re looking forward to the opportunity to scale our vision at Google.  Our first step will be to combine DocVerse with Google Apps to create a bridge between Microsoft Office and Google Apps.  I look forward to sharing more about our plans in the near future.

We want to thank each of our investors and advisors.   They are truly world-class and we could not have realized our vision without them being there every step of the way.  Most importantly, we want to thank our users, customers and partners.  They are the ones who truly defined our success and caused an amazing outcome.

Stay tuned for some really great things!

–    Shan & Alex

For more information on what is happening with DocVerse, read our FAQ.

Jive + DocVerse = Something You’ve Never Seen Before

More big news today here at DocVerse! I’m thrilled to announce that DocVerse has entered into a strategic partnership with Jive Software, the market leader for enterprise social collaboration software. As part of this partnership, Jive will distribute DocVerse Enterprise as a module of Jive SBS 4.0 under the name Jive Connects for Microsoft Office.

This is great news for both DocVerse and Jive — and giant news for the enterprise collaboration market. Together, Jive and DocVerse will bring a brand new form of social software to the most popular productivity tools in the world — Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel — the apps 600 million people depend upon every day.

As of today, the Jive Connects for Microsoft Office product offers the power of DocVerse to Jive’s industry leading enterprise customers around the world, including 15% of the Fortune 500.

But what gets me most excited about our partnership with Jive, is that our combined offering truly does redefine enterprise collaboration.The functionality enabled by combining DocVerse and Jive simply does not exist anywhere else today.

Not only will this combination have a huge impact on the daily lives of Jive users, it will also maximize Jive customers’ investment in SBS 4.0 by extending the same great user experience offered by the rest of SBS into the applications that almost everyone uses constantly, every day — Word, PowerPoint and Excel.

We’d like to thank the entire Jive Software team for making this partnership a reality.   I’ve spent the last 6 years in the collaboration industry and without a doubt, Jive is the leading company and product with the biggest vision for the future.  It’s a true privilege to work with such a high caliber team.

Read More on Bill Lynch’s blog, co-founder / VP Product Management of Jive Software.

And be sure to check out Jive World!

DocVerse Launches!

After 2 years in the making, today marks the official launch of DocVerse!  When Alex and I left Microsoft, our vision was to build a product that would fundamentally improve the daily lives of users of Microsoft Office — the most popular productivity suite in the world, with nearly 600 million users.  Specifically, we and our coworkers were personally frustrated by the constant back-and-forth email attachments required to share and edit Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents.  We were convinced that there had to be a better way!

And today, we are pleased to announce our first contribution toward that solution with the launch of DocVerse.

DocVerse is a plug-in for Microsoft Office that turns those applications into full-fledged, Web-enabled, collaboration tools.

DocVerse quickly and easily plugs into Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel, enabling truly painless, real-time sharing and simultaneous, group-editing of documents.

Give it a try (it’s free for 60 days!) and let us know what you think.

We’d love the feedback and would appreciate any suggestions that would help make DocVerse better for you and the rest of our users!