Microsoft will be shortly releasing their latest Office suite, version 2010, and to accompany it, they've developed a social network version of Office called Microsoft Docs. Docs.com is an online version of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint designed to create, share, and collaborate on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations with people on your social networks, like Facebook friends.

Docs.com is very similar to the Office Live Web apps, but Docs.com is designed solely as a way to share and co-edit documents among friends on your social networks, specifically Facebook. The interface is very similar also to the Live Web apps, but Docs.com is very sharing-oriented. As of today, Docs.com is still in beta testing stage, but if you have a Facebook account you can access Docs.com right now by just entering in your Facebook credentials.

Once logged in, you can access your saved documents, create new documents, and access your Facebook friend's documents. From the Add a Doc menu at the top, you can choose to upload a document (Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files) or create a new Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document.

The Word Docs.com interface is fairly straightforward and looks just like a slimmed-down version of the traditional Microsoft Word software program. The ribbon menu has three tabs, Home, Insert, and View. The Home tab has simple formatting, like font, paragraph formatting, and styles. From this tab you can also perform a spell check and open the document in Word installed on your computer. The next tab, Insert, is pretty sparse and just lets you insert a table and pictures. The clip art button lets you search Microsoft's online clip art database and place it into your document. However, in every test we did, we got an error that required us to reload Docs.com and have to start all over each time we tried to add the clip art to our document. Just again a reminder, Docs.com is in beta and isn't perfect (more flaws later).

Along the right side of each online application, you can edit the sharing options for the current open document. It allows you to modify who can edit and view the document. Users can choose Individual Friends, All of My Friends, Everyone, or Only Me. There's also an option to post the document to your Facebook wall too if you should choose to do so. Under the sharing options, you can post any text directly to your Facebook wall as well.

The Excel Docs.com interface is also just a trimmed down version of the software Excel. The ribbon menu allows you to format cells, sort data, and a few other small tasks, but there's really not much in the way of styling.

PowerPoint is also very basic and doesn't let you do any formatting of slides or anything too much more than just entering information and basic text/picture formatting. It also allows you view the slide show right from the site, but it opens in a pop-up window, so if you have a pop-up blocker you'll have to disable it. We should also mention that a few other features of Docs.com open in a pop-up, which are blocked by many pop-up blockers and Web browsers.

Also, another issue we discovered is when we tried to open our online documents in the actual Office software program by clicking the "Open in Word/Excel/PowerPoint" button, it went to a 404 Not Found error, but the file did open successfully in the correct program on our computer.

The My Docs link at the top of the Docs.com interface will show you all of your saved documents that you've created or opened online. The Friends' Docs link shows documents that are available for you to view/edit that belong to your Facebook friends who also use Docs.com.

In the end, Docs.com is a pretty good concept that will be useful for some who want to be able to share documents with friends, family, and coworkers. It offers good privacy options that allow you to strictly control who can see your saved documents and edit them too. However, it isn't without it's flaws, mostly ones that deal with clip art insertion and opening files from online to software. But since it is still in beta, we expect these issues to be resolved in the near future.