Working collaboratively

The days of emailing versions of documents back and forth are over (or rather they should be), because there are several online tools that provide document sharing, version control, and sometimes even real-time collaborative editing. Often, this software is free! It enables companies to achieve (or at least make great steps towards achieving) the following:

• reduce costs by reducing or eliminating costly software purchases and upgrades.
• increase productivity, because:
  • everyone uses the same version of the online software
  • the online software automatically keeps track of version histories
  • the online tools allow more than one person to edit the same document, at the same time (and even chat about it while editing)
• increase employee happiness, especially when partnered with a flexible working environment and telecommuting.

The most commonly discussed online collaborative document system is Google Docs. It is not as feature-full as some of their competitors (such as Zoho), and has a slightly different focus, but it is being actively developed, with new features appearing every few weeks. Unfortunately, I discovered the size limitation when testing with a large spreadsheets used in my current workplace. Office Live Workplace was launched to compete with Google and Zoho, but only supports file sharing, not real-time collaboration. Zoho offer a large suite other tools, although some are not free or are limited in features until you buy access to them.

In Google Docs you can create documents, spreadsheets, presentations, web-based forms (that immediately saves the data from the submitted form into a spreadsheet), and can also store PDF documents. Limited features are available when you aren't connected to the internet, providing you have installed Google Gears and 'backed up' your documents to your computer. You can upload files to Google documents in other many formats (.doc, .rtf, ppt, .xls, etc.) and export to multiple formats, including PDF.

Because version control is included in Google Docs, and the documents are accessible to anyone you have given access to, you don't have to keep emailing different versions around, or storing multiple copies of the document in various places on the company intranet. It saves a time when searching for information, encourages collaboration, and is less likely to result in duplicated work. Tony Karrer wrote an excellent post discussing remote collaboration using e-learning technology in January '09.