Collaboration on editing documents and spreadsheets is becoming a key feature in productivity suites with the emergence of Google Docs, Zoho, Etherpad and others. Even Microsoft is adding collaboration features to Excel in its new version of Office. While Microsoft is adding this limited functionality to its new version of office, DocVerse offers a plug-in for Word, PowerPoint and Excel that lets you collaborate with other users when editing a document.
Once downloaded, the DocVerse plug-in will appear on the right-hand sidebar of any Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel file. You can invite other users to collaborate with you, and once all partied have downloaded the plug-in, you can share documents with each other. Whether users are working on a document online or offline, DocVerse will track, manages and sync all changes to merge them into one updated version of the document. You can communicate with other users via an IM feature within the plug-in as well.
And DocVerse also allows for documents to be viewed on web. So you can transfer your document to the web, where DocVerse will render a high fidelity version of within it’s platform. You can also add comments from the web, which are synced automatically, enabling collaboration between people with and those without Microsoft Office software installed on their computers. Each DocVerse-edited document will feature an activity stream which is viewable via Microsoft Office, any Web browser, or an RSS stream.
DocVerse is priced based upon users and number of documents. For example, the plug-in is $49 per month for 500 documents and up to ten users. Although DocVerse will face competition from Microsoft itself when Office is released with more collaboration features, the plug-in is extremely useful for past versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Founded in 2007 by Microsoft veterans Shan Sinha and Alex DeNeui, DocVerse has raised $1.3 million in seed funding from Baseline Ventures, Harrison Metal Capital, Naval Ravikant and others. The startup also recently made an enterprise play by integrating its plug-in with popular social collaboration platform Jive.