I use Google Docs for storing and collaborating docs with colleagues and friends, but have always felt a lack of templates for professional documents in it. Last night, my manager asked me to prepare a really hardcore professional report immediately. I had my HP mini with me and wondered how I could find a suitable template for the document. That’s when I discovered an exhaustive library of professional documents online and saved myself from the wrath of my nasty manager.

Docstoc is for professional documents what Flickr is for photos and YouTube is for videos. Docstoc is an online document community, which is more like a social networking site for professional documents. I must say, I was surprised when I saw the documents for the economic cost of Iraq war and the salary of White House staff in it.

California based Docstoc was launched by Alon Shwartz and Jason Nazar in 2007. It actually owns a huge database of more than 3 million documents, which is much larger than any of its contemporaries. It allows users to search, store, share, and publish any type of document in its database. Signing up on Docstoc is easy, just enter your email id, username and password, and start using it.

You can find professional documents for almost every single topic ranging from legal to business, educational to tax and finance, or even from real estate to politics and the whole lot on Docstoc. You can easily search documents in their database by different categories and also by their popularity, downloads, rating and viewings also.

Docstoc provides the easiest way of finding and downloading professional documents for free. You can also upload your document or even post reviews or rate other articles. Docstoc supports a lot of different formats such as Text, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Illustrator; above all, it also supports PDF files. Docstoc excels over Google doc in file size limit too. The maximum size limit for uploading a single file is 50MB while Google Docs supports not more than 500KB in documents and 10MB in spreadsheets and presentations.

It is a huge resource for finding professional documents, but you can’t edit them on the website. You need to download them first, edit them on your system and then upload them back to your profile to overwrite it. I found this a little annoying; I would definitely prefer an integrated text editor to do the editing on the website itself like Google Docs. However, you can preview your documents, email or even embed them on your website.

Docstoc also has social networking aspects to it, where users can create their profiles and collaborate their documents with others. In the profile page, you can view your friends, uploads, views, downloads, and reviews, all in a single interface. You can also select different folders and categories for your documents and make them public or private. You can also keep a track of how many people have viewed your document and rated them.

You can also add tags, title and description for your documents. It supports multiple file uploads, email and web based uploads too. Docstoc also offers a few APIs and widgets to connect your profile with other social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook. You can also make dollars from uploading your document on Docstoc by signing up for their DocCash program.

We can easily create and search simple documents on the Internet, but creating a perfect professional document such as a contract or a legal document is a Herculean task. Docstoc is definitely an excellent platform for startups or small business firms to find and share professional documents. My manager congratulated me on my report, thanks to my HP Mini and Docstoc.