Microsoft is working on a brand new platform to publish and share documents online: Docs.com.
Docs.com allows you to easily share PowerPoint, Excel, Word, PDF, Sway, and Office Mix content with others. Current functionality includes the ability to embed content into other webpages, create and share collections of content and commenting. Microsoft has been working on this new publishing service for the better part of 2015, first launching it in private beta in March, now Microsoft has silently expanded it to a public beta. You can try it out now by signing in to Docs.com with your Microsoft Account.
"But wait, doesn't OneDrive already allows you to share Office documents?" - Yes, but OneDrive is geared towards collaborating on documents, with Docs Microsoft is focusing purely on sharing,. You can think of it as Microsoft's answer to SlideShare, but with better support for different document types.
"Isn't Docs.com around since, like, 2010?" Well, sort of... Microsoft Fuse Labs launched 'Docs for Facebook' in 2010 using the docs.com URL, that service has moved to fb.docs.com. Some might call the new Docs.com an update to Docs for Facebook. While the old service shared some of the functionality of the new platform, it relied heavily on Facebook for sharing. The new Docs is actually an entirely new service built from the ground up by a different team.
Docs supports PowerPoint, Excel, Word, PDF, Sway, and Office Mix documents, you can upload them from your PC or import them from other Microsoft services, including OneDrive. When you share a file you can choose enable others to download your file and/or comment on it, commenting is currently implemented using Disqus. You can then share your creation using a link, or by embedding the documents in another webpage. Docs also enables you to create collections, sets of curated content from Docs.com and around the web.
