I have also played around with Googledocs, which is Google’s service, that allows users to create and edit documents online while collaborating in real-time with other users. With Googledocs you can create a document (either within googledocs or you can upload e.g. a word document) and you can share the document with other users. You can then determind their rights, whether they can edit the document or just assess it to read. I find this concept where you can edit and share documents in real.time very interesting and very useful, but I have experienced some problems with text disapearing when I download a document into Word. My biggest issues (I do not know if is because I am a girl…) is with the format. Even though you can apply different formats (heading 1, 2 etc.) it looks very disturbing and the margins seems a bit odd.
The next tool a tried is Zoho Writer. I have not used it for very long, but so far I am very satisfied. Zoho Writer is an online word processot that allows you to edit, store and share your documents online and offline, and you will have access to them from any computer – very similar to Googledocs. You can edit the documents directly within the browser with a very useful WYSIWYG editor as well as instant collaboration, commenting and chat facilities. Zoho Writer has a tab-based user interface, where the features are categorized under different tabs for easy accessibility and easy navigation.
As shown in the picture each tab in the toolbar comes with a drop down arrow with a lists of the underlying features. You can easily browse through the features and apply them to your document without having to navigate away from the existing highlighted tab – much like Microsoft Office 2007.
One of the features I like the most is that you can edit the documents in ‘Page View’ and know the print-layout of the document in real time.
When sharing a document in Zoho Writer, you can give others users access to that document to view or edit in real time – which mean that if someone makes a change, the document gets updated for everyone.
Another handy feature is that you can post the document directly to your blog, and thus use the editor in Zoho to make your blog post look excatly as you like, add tags, hyperlinks etc.
I think that Zoho offers some great options for collaborating within a team, and I intend to try it out in future project. I hope this will help you when collaborating and sharing document online.
Best,
Rikke
#1 by Birgit on October 9th, 2009
Hi Rikke,
thanks for the great selection of tools. Another document sharing side for collaboration is http://www.showdocument.com/ds/main.jsf
with interactive Whiteboards, Youtube sharing and so on. It is really interesting how many different tools are out there and I appreciate if a good selection with benefits and drawbacks is provided, as you did.
#2 by Arturas on October 10th, 2009
Definitely Google Docs is a clear market leader today for online document collaboration, we have it integrated with our tool http://www.comindwork.com, though Microsoft is starting to gain some ground here too, it’s gona be a rough battle, though the users i believe will only win in this case with even more new features
#3 by laura wilson on October 12th, 2009
For web conferences you should try http://www.showdocument.com ,
Great for online teaching and collaborating. I use it for working on my designs with other in my field.
Its free and pretty simple – you just upload your file and invite others to view it together.
- Laura W.
#4 by Bader14's on October 14th, 2009
Hi Rikke,
Thanks for this information;
Nowadays, there are a lot of online collaboration tools.
Anyway, What do you think about the best collaboration tools..
I believe that Googledocs is the best collaboration tools.
Thanks,
Bader14’s
#5 by rikkeefferbach on October 22nd, 2009
Hi all,
Thanks for your comments. I find google docs very helpful, and I like the fact that you can edit it in real time and multiple users at the same time. I still belive that there are some problems with the format, and that really annoys me. At the moment I’m trying to edit a 40 pages long document, and google docs wont let me download it correctly into word, so I have to copy/paste and format it in word – that takes a long time.
Rikke
#6 by Ben McCallum on October 23rd, 2009
Zoho have some great tools, I’ve previously blogged about Zoho Projects here: http://benmccallum.wordpress.com/2009/09/12/zoho-projects-review/
#7 by Steve Aw on October 25th, 2009
I think Google Docs can be better…
Like during the transferring from Google Docs to physical computer’s Microsoft Word, the format went totally off. And we have to take more time to reformat the entire report again.
Thats why i think Google’s upcoming Communication and Collaborative tool, Google Wave should fix all this issues…
I have blog about Google Wave here:
http://steveaw.wordpress.com/2009/10/20/google-wave-best-personal-communication-collaboration-tool/