It seems that not everyone is happy with the new Office Plug-in released by Google just last week. In fact, Microsoft has even gone out of its way to blog about various issues that they believe the new Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office has for users.
According to the GCN, Microsoft has not only talked about various problematic issues with Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office, it even alleges that data privacy is at risk.
Microsoft claims that if you turn on automatic syncing and do not change the default sharing location, all of your documents are accessible to others. But as a commenter on the Microsoft blog mentions, this is not actually the case as default document storage is set to private.
Another issue that Microsoft brings up is the lack of some Office functionality when users run Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office. The company states that features such as track changes, sort settings, table styles and more may cause some issues with the plug-in. However, this is also something that the Office Web Apps have suffered with in the past, and in some cases, still do now.
Finally, Microsoft has claimed that Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office may cause data loss, stating that working with features and files that don’t work with the plug-in can lead to some syncing errors and data loss.
Judging from the quick blog post from the company, it seems that Microsoft may be a little scared of the new plug-in and rightly so, as many users have said they have waited for this option from Google for some time and are very happy with this first public version.
Google Cloud Connect can be installed on most versions of Office 2003, 2007 and 2010, but not with Office 2010 starter edition or any version that Microsoft’s Click-to-Run service has been used with.