Citrix adds document collaboration tools to GoToMeeting

Citrix subsidiary Citrix Online is adding document collaboration tools to its GoToMeeting web conferencing service, based on technology gained from the acquisition of ShareFile earlier this year.

Available from the first quarter of 2012, the updated GoToMeeting adds a Workspaces feature that allows the creation and management of online folders and files for collaboration.

This will enable workers to view documents through GoToMeeting and make real-time annotations.

"We believe that document-based collaboration is broken because it is done mostly through email. Through the acquisition of ShareFile, we are going to power basic document-based collaboration through GoToMeeting," Bernado de Albergaria, vice president of Citrix Online, told V3.

In a demonstration, de Albergaria showed how a user can drag and drop a document from their PC to GoToMeeting to share it, and then mark up the document from within GoToMeeting, adding annotations.

However, Citrix said that it is not positioning the tool as another online productivity suite to rival Google Docs or Microsoft Office Web Apps.

"There is a little bit of that capability. But we always assume you are creating the document in some suite, so when you collaborate, you can do it from within a familiar environment like GoToMeeting," de Albergaria said.

Instead, de Albergaria claimed that the new capabilities will solve many of the problems that occur when changes are made to collaborative documents.

"Today, you often have to go through a presentation slide by slide to figure out what changes have been made when someone else updates a file," he said.

GoToMeeting now contains version control tools, so that employees can see which changes have been made and backtrack if necessary.

The Workspaces capabilities will be added at no additional charge, according to Citrix, and instead will form a standard part of the firm's collaborative platform. A certain amount of free storage for files will come as part of the upgrade, but the exact figure has yet to be decided.

ShareFile will continue to be offered as a standalone service, de Albergaria added.