Google Docs is becoming more and more a heavy contender to Microsoft Office. The free office fleet of free web-based software has a very intuitive design, fast speed, great performance and highly robust functionality. Even still, Google Docs has not stolen a huge percentage of population from Microsoft’s bread and butter software: Office. From some estimates, Google Docs only has 4% of the US consumer market as regular users.

Sharing capabilities are at the core of web-based office software. Google has just released a series of updates to streamline and improve the sharing functions for it’s Docs program. Here is an outline of the sharing capabilities for Docs:

• By default, documents are private.
• The visibility of a document can be seen clearly next to the document title.
• It is very simple to share a document: users can change the doc settings, add editors, or view and change who has access.
• Document batch editing: Documents can be batch edited from the browse panel of Docs. The settings of numerous web documents can be changed at one time.

Recent changes:

• Public on the web: A setting that allows your document to be found publicly online. If you share the permanent URL online by linking to it from a website or webpage, it will increase the ability for search engines to find documents that having been enabled for public view.
• Link access only: This option closes off public general access, but allows anyone with a (direct) link to view the document by clicking that specific web link.
• Private: a default setting that restricts viewership unless the author has given explicit access to a specific person.