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Earlier this week, Microsoft launched its Facebook connected online office suite Docs.com. Docs offers online versions of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Users can also choose to share these documents with their Facebook friends. Overall, Docs falls somewhat short of being a replacement for a desktop office suite. Even though it offers a better interface than Google Docs and Zoho, its functionality often feels deliberately crippled in order to push users to use (and buy) Microsoft Office.

One of the features that Google's online office program Google Docs lacks is a cloud-based version of Microsoft Office's "clipboard" feature. Although you can copy and paste when using Docs, it's a much simpler procedure. The keyboard shortcut "Ctrl + C" copies and "Ctrl + V" pastes, but it's a one-time process. You can't accumulate a collection of copied items for later pasting as you can with the Office clipboard.

Some may argue that's by design - Google likes to keep things simple. However, it appears that may not be the case, after all. As spotted by the Google Operating System blog, a new server-side clipboard looks like it may be close to launch.

When Google announced an upgrade to their Google Docs service earlier this month, a company blog post also mentioned several third-party applications which can help make the transition to the online service easier. With these apps, you can transfer and synchronize your local files to Google Docs without having to upload them one-by-one. But which application is right for you?

We took a look at the options Google suggested and have summarized the features, drawbacks and pricing information below. In addition, we also reviewed one other application not specifically mentioned in the Google blog post that may be of use to those moving to the cloud-based service.

Adobe's online office suite, Acrobat.com, is getting its first major upgrade since the service left beta back in June of this year. The new release, launching tomorrow, is an entirely unified experience thanks to the addition of a much-requested file organization tool, explains the service's Director of Project Management Rick Treitman.

Also new are 35 user-requested features, including file searching capabilities and integrations with web services like Flickr and Google Image Search. However, one of the most exciting pieces to the upgraded service is the newly launched mobile component. With Acrobat.com's smartphone application, users won't just have access to their files on the go - they can also scan in new documents with their phone's camera.

The current crop of online office suites from Google, Zoho, or ThinkFree is quite usable, but most of these products still feel very limited compared to the power of Microsoft's Office products. The newest entrant in this market, Live Documents, however, is trying to change this by developing a fully featured online/offline office suite. Yesterday, Live Documents, which was co-founded by Sabeer Bhatia, who famously sold Hotmail to Microsoft in 1998, released its first product: Live Presentations.