Google said Monday that the company will soon offer the ability to edit Google Docs documents on Android devices and the Apple iPad.
The announcement, made at the company’s Atmosphere event near Paris, arrived alongside Google’s announcement of two-factor authentication for Google Apps, which sends passwords to a mobile phone.
Google didn’t say much about the additional editing capability, officially referring to it only via a blog post by Dave Girouard, the president of Google Enterprise.
“Today we demonstrated new mobile editing capabilities for Google Docs on the Android platform and the iPad,” Girouard wrote. “In the next few weeks, co-workers around the world will soon be able to co-edit files simultaneously from an even wider array of devices.”
The technology is reportedly predicated on DocVerse, which Google bought in March. DocVerse alows users of PowerPoint, Word, and Excel documents to collaborate and save them to the cloud, using what the company originally debuted as a right-hand nav bar with chat and other features. Although DocVerse originally provided up to 1 GB of free storage, with any additional files costing $0.25 per GB per year, the service would presumably be rolled into the Google Apps Premier Edition fee, or $50 per user per year.
More than 3 million businesses have “gone Google,”choosing to use Google hosted services, serving over 30 million users within businesses, schools and other locations, Google said.
The fight over productivity apps continues. In September, BlackBerry maker Research in Motion bought DataViz. Apple has offered its iWork suite for iPad in addition to its desktop version, and Microsfot Office Mobile 10 provides Office integration with its Windows Mobile legacy devices and soon its new Windows Phone 7 phones.