Docs.com was a
website
A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Wikip ...
where users could discover, upload and share Office documents. Supported file types included
Word documents,
Excel spreadsheets,
PowerPoint presentations, Mix video presentations and
Sways. Users could also add
PDFs and
URL
A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), colloquially termed as a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifi ...
s on to their page.
Docs.com was a part of
Microsoft Office Online
Microsoft Office, or simply Office, is the former name of a family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a marketin ...
.
On June 9, 2017, Microsoft announced it would shut down Docs.com on December 15, 2017 in favor of the acquired SlideShare with its LinkedIn purchase. It is now a redirect to Microsoft's technical documentation that resides at docs.microsoft.com.
Collaboration with Facebook
Prior to its redesign Docs.com was a collaboration between
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...
FUSE Labs Microsoft's Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Labs was started by Ray Ozzie and is run bLili Cheng The group focuses on real-time and media rich experiences and is located in Bellevue, WA. It used to have offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Camb ...
and
Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin ...
to provide a basic online document editing suite, similar to
Google Docs
Google Docs is an online word processor included as part of the free, web-based Google Docs Editors suite offered by Google, which also includes: Google Sheets, Google Slides, Google Drawings, Google Forms, Google Sites and Google Keep. G ...
.
It is designed to make it easy to discover, create and share Office documents with your Facebook friends. It was announced and officially launched during Facebook f8 conference on April 21, 2010 by
Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (; born ) is an American business magnate, internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He is known for co-founding the social media website Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook, Inc.), of ...
and Lili Cheng.
Docs.com originally offered the capability to upload or create new
Word
A word is a basic element of language that carries an objective or practical meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consen ...
,
Excel
ExCeL London (an abbreviation for Exhibition Centre London) is an exhibition centre, international convention centre and former hospital in the Custom House area of Newham, East London. It is situated on a site on the northern quay of the Ro ...
or
PowerPoint
Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation program, created by Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin at a software company named Forethought, Inc. It was released on April 20, 1987, initially for Macintosh computers only. Microsoft acquired PowerPoi ...
documents. Users may view and edit documents online even if they did not have Microsoft Office installed on their device. However, the docs.com web editors integrate with Office so that users may edit documents on their PC or Mac and save them directly back to the cloud. Docs.com also supports upload and in-browser viewing of PDF documents.
In January 2011, the site gained support for additional languages.
Docs.com for Facebook was targeting individual users (e.g. students). A similar offering from
Microsoft Office Live
Microsoft Office Live is a discontinued web-based service providing document sharing and website creation tools for consumers and small businesses. Its successor was branded Windows Live. Office Live consisted of two services, ''Office Live Worksp ...
is directed at business customers.
Technical details
The Facebook-based Docs.com used Facebook Connect for user authentication. Furthermore, the service was modeled after the Facebook Photos application and uses similar sharing settings so that users may easily invite their friends to either view or edit their documents. Docs.com integrates into the Facebook UI much like photos by providing a homepage within Facebook, a profile tab, and by posting documents to a user's Facebook Wall. The service is built using Microsoft's
Office Web Apps and was compatible with the contemporary major browsers:
Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Microsoft Wind ...
,
Firefox
Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and ...
,
Safari
A safari (; ) is an overland journey to observe wild animals, especially in eastern or southern Africa. The so-called "Big Five" game animals of Africa – lion, leopard, rhinoceros, elephant, and Cape buffalo – particularly form an importa ...
and
Chrome
Chrome may refer to:
Materials
* Chrome plating, a process of surfacing with chromium
* Chrome alum, a chemical used in mordanting and photographic film
Computing
* Google Chrome, a web browser developed by Google
** ChromeOS, a Google Chrome- ...
.
Support for Facebook pages
Docs.com announced support for Facebook pages on July 8, 2010. Facebook page administrators had the option to create a shared folder where they may upload, create and edit shared documents. Documents can easily be posted to a Facebook page for the page's fans to view. Lear
how the functionality workso
how it was built
2015 redesign
In 2015, Microsoft launched a new version of Docs.com. The redesigned service was created to make sharing documents less difficult over the web while also preserving source formatting. Among the supported formats are Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Excel, PDF, and Office Sway among other Office-supported file-types, furthermore Docs.com offers importing features to quickly fetch documents from a user's PC and other Microsoft services such as OneDrive. Docs.com also supports commenting and the downloading of documents, but lacks the feature for users to collaborate on the same documents.
As part of the relaunch of Docs.com Microsoft merged its web accumulation software, Curah! with Docs.com, and at the time of the announcement launched the
Windows 10
Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It is the direct successor to Windows 8.1, which was released nearly two years earlier. It was released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on ...
application for
Office Sway
Microsoft Sway is a presentation program and is part of the Microsoft Office family of products. Sway was offered for general release by Microsoft in August 2015. It allows users who have a Microsoft account to combine text and media to create ...
which also integrated several of Curah!'s features.
2017 case of sensitive documents
On 25 March 2017, Microsoft temporarily disabled the search feature after the security researcher Kevin Beaumount discovered that some users had inadvertently uploaded confidential documents containing sensitive information such as passwords,
social security number
In the United States, a Social Security number (SSN) is a nine-digit number issued to U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and temporary (working) residents under section 205(c)(2) of the Social Security Act, codified as . The number is issued t ...
s and bank statements. The search feature was restored on 27 March. According to ''
PCWorld
''PC World'' (stylized as PCWorld) is a global computer magazine published monthly by IDG. Since 2013, it has been an online only publication.
It offers advice on various aspects of PCs and related items, the Internet, and other personal tec ...
'', many other document and productivity services (including Microsoft's) by default upload the document as private. However, users of Docs.com were in error as to the purpose of the service, despite its tagline "Share your work with the world".
References
External links
Docs.com
{{DEFAULTSORT:Docs.Com
Microsoft Office
Microsoft websites
Internet properties established in 2010
Internet properties disestablished in 2017