IDG Contributor Network: Microsoft opens up co-authoring to third-party file sharing vendors. Take that, Google Docs

I remember half a dozen years ago when I saw, for the first time, a document being authored by multiple people, in multiple locations, simultaneously. What Google Docs enabled was kind of like rocket science, admittedly in a rather geeky way. All of a sudden the traditional model of emailing files backwards and forwards was replaced by something more like a real world way of working. Of course, sometimes that ability gets a little skewed and we've all probably seen crazy examples of simultaneously created documents going wild. But for the most part, it's awesome.

It's also one of the biggest differentiators between the other file synchronization and sharing vendors and Google. Because Google has its own document creation and file-sharing components, it can enable this sort of stuff. For a Box or Dropbox, this isn't the case.

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