What’s different about the new Google Docs: Working together, even apart

Earlier this year, we launched new editors for documents and spreadsheets on Google Docs, built on a code base designed to improve collaboration and take advantage of the latest advances in modern browsers. These applications support up to 50 simultaneous editors, and documents let you see other people’s changes character-by-character as they type.

This week we wanted to share a series of posts on the Google Docs blog that dive into the collaboration technology behind Google Docs. In the first post, we look at the challenges encountered when building a collaborative application. The second post describes how Google Docs uses an algorithm called operational transformation to merge edits in real time. Lastly, the we end the series with a deep dive into the collaboration protocol for sending changes between editors in a document. Together, these technologies create the character-by-character collaboration in Google Docs.

These improvements to Google Docs are designed to help businesses like yours move to the cloud faster and be more productive than ever before. If you've never tried our web-based documents, spreadsheets and presentations, you can instantly take a test drive at docs.google.com/demo.

Posted by John Day-Richter, Software Engineer