It appears that Microsoft is about to re-launch a document sharing service called Docs.com. The site, which is open to the public, makes it easy to share documents publicly and will likely be part of the Office family when it is released.
Interestingly, Docs.com is not new to the Microsoft family but has gone un-loved for many years. It looks like they may be planning to re-launch the service as it first made its appearance in 2010.
If you head on over to docs.com, you can setup your account and play around with the tool. The website makes it very simple to share any document publicly but only works with Word, Excel, Sway, PowerPoint and PDFs.
The site allows you to obtain feedback about your documents and uses Disqus for commenting. There are options to embed the media in an external site and of course the standard options for sharing via a link on any social network. You can also see how many times a file was viewed and downloaded too.
The site appears to be quite robust in terms of being complete and does not look like a side-project for the company. Seeing how far along the site is, we suspect the company will be announcing the service soon although it does still have a beta tag.
For Microsoft, this service will be a complement to its Office portfolio and for consumers, a convenient way to share documents publicly; the embed feature will be helpful for those who need to display Office-based content on their website too.
We will be curious to see if Microsoft keeps this service free or if they will require an Office 365 subscription; they may have some free version along with a premium Office 365 offering as well.
Thanks for the tip Angelo!