London Regional ICT Champion

Last week I finished off an expanded version of the ‘Great Web Office Experiment’ article for the ICT Hub Knowledgebase – which talks about practical reasons for using web tools to collaborate with colleagues and the tools you could use to do this, even replacing desktop applications.

To recap, some of the benefits of using online tools for collaborative writing we found were:

• All you need is a computer with a broadband Internet connection and a web browser;
• Extremely easy document sharing and collaboration – just think about how often you’ve worked on a shared document and struggled to figure out the changes made by another author;
• Familiar, intuitive word processor and spreadsheet interfaces;
• Versioning by saving a history of changes (who and when) that can be viewed and compared;
• Ability to save local copies if desired;
• Ability to import and export documents in various file formats (doc, csv, rtf, txt, html, opd, sxw, pdf)

The tools I mentioned for collaborative writing – ThinkFree, Zoho, and Google Docs – are not the only players out there, and you can read more about them at Kolabora and Robin Good.

Coventi Pages looks to be the most interesting of the emerging players in the collaborative writing space with its stripped down set of writing features (like Google Docs) and strong focus on promoting discussion, highlighting text and notes to the fore. You can read a discussion about Coventi’s approach here.

The other key difference between Coventi Pages and other collaborative writing tools is the emphasis it places on a single author’s ownership of a document, with others permitted to comment on rather than being allowed to edit text. This is a completely different approach to the more popular ‘wiki’ in which all contributors are considered co-authors with equal rights to change a document.

Even the venerable PC Pro Magazine is getting in on the discussion about the value of online tools when deputy editor David Fearon says that:

“Google now carries all my personal notes and random ideas, various household budgeting spreadsheets, my cycling log (anally retentive, me?) and basically any new document that’s less than about 500 words long. The piles of paper notebooks sitting in shoeboxes under my bed will, henceforth, not grow any larger.”

Google Docs was also used to plan, organise and marshall a geographically dispersed team of freelance writers, editorial staff and magazine layout designers for a recent PC Pro article on Windows Vista – a great example for the practical value of using collaborative writing tools.

However, as we touched on the ‘Great Web Office Experiment’, the downside of organising one’s digital life like this is data persistance – the idea that your documents are always available, always backed up and and always readable. Now, how many of us have old data from legacy software no longer available, locked away on floppy dics or other media? Plenty, I bet.

In a web office context this means:

• choosing a sustainable provider likely to be around for a few years;
• choosing a provider with support for open document file formats (Google, Zoho);
• regularly downloading and backing up your work.

My own personal favourite web office tool at the time was ThinkFree because it did all the things I needed to produce a complex business document with tables and charts and share it with colleagues. Whilst there will still be a need for high-powered applications like ThinkFree, we will now see more web office tools continue the collaboration trend set by Google Docs and Coventi Pages – basic word processing, open file standards and a strong emphasis on group collaboration and discussion.