Scott Johnston may be far from Ann Arbor, but he believes his current project offers tools that can spur entrepreneurial activity in his hometown.

Johnston, a 1992 Huron High School graduate, is now a group product manager for Google, leading the development of new features for the company’s Google Docs and Google Sites products.

Google Docs, a service that allows users to edit and access documents and spreadsheets online and easily share them with collaborators, is making it easier for entrepreneurs to innovate, he said.

Johnston, who recently led Google’s integration of a new commenting feature into Google Docs, said he believes that the surge in mobile devices will accelerate the transition toward document sharing services like Google Docs.

Johnston still visits Ann Arbor every couple of months. His father, Jere Johnston, is a professor at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research, and his mother, Patricia Johnston, is a retired principal of Wines Elementary School.

Johnston recently spoke with AnnArbor.com’s Nathan Bomey about how collaborative work is changing via document sharing services, whether personal data is secure with Google and what it’s like to work with Google co-founder, CEO and 1995 U-M graduate Larry Page. Excerpts:

AnnArbor.com: What about your Michigan experience and your time in Ann Arbor prepared you for a position like you’re in right now at Google?

Scott Johnston: I can’t tell you how much I love Ann Arbor. I was raised an obsessive Michigan fan. I didn’t miss a home game until I went to college, so it’s sort of in my blood.

My dad’s a professor at the University of Michigan, my mother was a teacher and a principal in the Ann Arbor school system and that education background really is at the core of what I’m doing now in terms of the collaborative nature of the Google Docs products. It really impacts education, in my mind. It lets people work together in ways they couldn’t before, and so that’s really sort of where I get a lot of my motivation.

AnnArbor.com: Where is collaborative work headed right now and how can Google Docs stay ahead of the curve?

Johnston: At a high level, I’d say collaboration is moving toward access everywhere. I think the mobile explosion is really helping that, where we now all have computers in our pockets.

The core of Google Docs that allows you to work together so seamlessly is really what we’re seeing change the way people operate. It means there are more experts involved in authoring a document, it means there are more perspectives that are brought into the assembly of a document, and it means it’s much easier to distribute.

Those properties have really had a big impact, and I think we’re just going to keep moving in that direction in helping you understand the information you’re creating and how to navigate through it.

AnnArbor.com: What does the new commenting system add to the Google Docs capability?

Johnston: When talking with our customers, we would find that one of their major complaints was actually the time it took to put together a document, no matter what that document was about.

It was the sending back and forth, waiting for feedback, correlating that feedback.

We found there was a natural workflow there, where people would submit feedback, there would be a discussion about that feedback and that discussion would resolve itself. So what we really wanted to do was make the software adapt to help people who were working.

That’s what the discussion component is all about. We acknowledge that natural workflow, we let you do it quickly. Reviewing a document becomes less of a weighty exercise and more of something you can jump into real quick, give some quick feedback on the first few paragraphs and then jump back into later. It’s a very lightweight thing, and that gets people discussing a lot more.

AnnArbor.com: A lot of companies and personal users are still hesitant about putting documents and personal data online because of security concerns. Do you feel like that will always be a lingering question, or will the transition eventually be complete to online data storage?

Johnston: It will move to full online data storage without question. I think it’s just something people need to get used to. We used to put our money in our mattress and it was safer there.

I have a 4-year-old, and he will never know what a disc drive is. People will stop remembering data as having to be somewhere. We already see this in mobile. They just expect it to be everywhere, and the ‘cloud’ is the right solution for that.

AnnArbor.com: But then, of course, that means that people have to be satisfied with the security level of a system like Google Docs. Is it at the point where people can be confident that their data is secure at Google?

Johnston: Absolutely. I am constantly blown away by our security team. We have some of the best and the brightest in the industry working on exactly this, and we’re obsessive about it, and we’re just going to keep investing in that area.

It’s something that’s really critical to us that people feel safe with their data, and I think you’re really going to us putting more and more features in this area that help people feel comfortable.

AnnArbor.com: What lessons can we learn in Ann Arbor from what you've seen in Silicon Valley?

Johnston: One of the things I love seeing is having the university foster their entrepreneurial spirit. Ann Arbor itself is a great town, and I’m seeing more and more Michigan grads stick around afterwards.

Google Apps allows a company to start without any of the normal, typical, historical startup costs of having servers and a bunch of infrastructure they need to build. We have a great innovation base out of the University of Michigan. Products like Google Apps allow you to be extremely nimble.

You’re finding people to work with and then you’re being extremely flexible with the ideas you’re working on and quickly moving — that’s one of the key things Silicon Valley does really well. You see startups recreate themselves constantly. We’re starting to see a lot of that happening in Ann Arbor, and that is an exciting thing.

AnnArbor.com: Do you ever have any interaction with the Google office in Ann Arbor? I know it’s mostly sales.

Johnston: Yeah, I try to get back at least every two or three months and whenever I do, I stop in there often, often have discussion sessions with them and do presentations there. It’s a great office.

AnnArbor.com: U-M grad Larry Page is the CEO of Google now, and he’s reportedly taking a more hands-on approach to product development. Has it affected you at all?

Johnston: It has been a really smooth transition. I’m really excited about what Larry’s doing. I think you’re just starting to see the impact — with things like Google Plus — of the changes he’s making and the ways he’s driving the company

AnnArbor.com: I know it’s still early, but how do you think Google Plus will change social networking and Google itself?

Johnston: We’ve really been focusing on people of late and wanting to show how people understand relationships and how information is discovered. So that is part of that solution.

Our goal is to be a search box so you can find anything and part of that involves social relationships. So I’m excited to see that finally released and embraced. It’s just part of an overall strategy to focus on people.

AnnArbor.com: What’s next on your plate? What are you working on that you can tell us about?

Johnston: We’re just really focused in Google Docs now on really accelerating innovation and by being a tool that allows you to easily share information but also easily understand the information that’s being created around you, near you or by experts.

So a lot of what we’re focused on now are some of the really fun things around what you can do now that you have data in the cloud that can be run through what is near infinite computer power.

Contact AnnArbor.com's Nathan Bomey at (734) 623-2587 or nathanbomey@annarbor.com. You can also follow him on Twitter or subscribe to AnnArbor.com's newsletters.