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Still depressed that you don’t have a Google Wave invite?  Still confused about what, exactly, Google Wave allows you to do?  Well, there’s always Google’s other useful for collaboration tool and cloud word processor, Google Docs.  Google today decided to make the whole service easier for those who use it to store multiple files that are also on local computers, or who share a number of documents with others.

The new Google Docs features will allow users to finally share files with one another.  Just as in single documents, there’s a link to share whole folders now.  The folders will be shared just as you see them, so just add a new file when you need to, or take another out when you don’t want it shared any more.  It would make it much easier if there’s a lot of documents you share with the same people, so you won’t have to share them individually.  Of course, you won’t be able to share everything that isn’t in a folder.  The other new feature, which is more of a “why didn’t it do that before?” is batch uploading, so you no longer have to upload new files one by one into Google Docs.

With Google trying to get a companies and schools to “Go Google,” the updates make a lot of sense.  These are features that would be obvious for using Google Docs with a large batch of previous files and sharing a number of related files with groups of people.  It might not make people look away from Google Wave for too long, but it is certainly a welcome addition to me, as someone who’s been using Google Docs as a collaborative tool for some time.  Even if it is older and not in real-tie, Google Docs is still arguably better for collaboration than Google Wave, at least until someone builds a spreadsheet extension, and more people learn how to use Wave.  Even still, Docs will still be of greater use to those who don’t need to collaborate.

Read [Google Docs Blog]