[Web Informant] 11 March 2009: Four better ways to collaborate than Google Docs

[David Strom]

Web Informant 11 March 2009: Four better ways to collaborate than Google Docs

If you are looking for something better than Google Docs to work on a
document or a presentation with a colleague, this column is for you. I
will touch on four alternatives that are all better solutions and can
give you ways to create your work product faster.

I have tried Google Docs in a few different situations, and they have
been abject failures for different reasons: either the group of
potential collaborators has never worked together before, or is too
widely distributed geographically or organizationally to have
developed any common work habits. As someone who has written two books
with co-authors (along with countless magazine articles that get
edited along the way), I can tell you the hardest part about
collaboration isn't the technical aspects -- it is the human
interactions and developing the various trusted relationships with
your co-workers.

The other downside to using Google is that at its heart it still is
serial workflow – I write my document and email a link so that you can
continue to work on it. What we need are tools that can combine the
immediacy of Instant Messaging with the viral power of social networks
to help a group of content creators to get started to work together.

If your ultimate product is a document, start with the service
Etherpad.com. You can bring up a common shared workspace inside your
browser and multiple authors can add their comments in a chat window
off to the side and compose on screen in real-time. Each author is
given their own colored font to keep track of changes, and you can go
back to particular versions quite easily. This service is great if you
want to work with a writing partner on a proposal, say. Or if you have
to assemble a final report from several sources and want all the
authors to quickly converge on a series of recommendations.

But that solution is just for text. What about that bane of corporate
life, PowerPoint slide decks? Here a service called SlideShare.net has
a nifty solution. It goes beyond just sharing your slides by having a
layer of social networking on top of things. You can add comments to
individual slides, group a series of presentations together (such as
all the sessions at a particular conference), add a voice narration
track that can be synchronized to the slides, and more. All of this is
of course available inside a Web browser. The speaker's notes that
accompany each slide is also displayed and indexed by the search
engines, which can be a good or bad thing depending on how you use
this feature. And you can embed your slides in your blog or broadcast
them to your friends on various social networks. The downside is that
your builds and transition effects are lost, so if your slides have a
lot of these effects, you aren't going to be too happy with the
service. I had problems using the Mac Safari to upload my files too.

Moving on beyond slide decks is the service called drop.io for
real-time collaboration that is based on an IM-style chat service. You
bring up a browser and point to a common URL and off you go. You can
drag and drop photos, documents, whatever and they show up in the
common workspace, which you can view as a chat stream or a file
directory. You can add comments, voice messages, even faxes (remember
them?) to your shared workspace. When you have reached a point where
you want others to review your work, you can send out a broadcast
message to your Facebook or Twitter friends or gather everything up in
a Zip file. For collections of files less than 100MB, the service is
free.

Speaking of Twitter (isn't everyone these days?), one final service
that I will mention here is Yammer.com. If you think of this as a
private social network discussion board that combines some of the
notification and flexibility of Twitter with that of the traditional
BBS's, you got it. You can share files, have a tag cloud and a layer
of search on top of everything too.

There are lots of other specialized collaboration tools – Collab.net's
free Subversion is useful for tracking software development projects,
and Clarizen.com's fee-based project management tool is another one
that I haven't tried but seems useful in that area.

The nice thing about all of the services that I mention is that they
all have free versions. With drop.io, if you want more room, you can
get upgraded for $10 a gigabyte per year or if you want more
management for $20 a month plan for 20 GB of storage. Yammer has a
paid version if you want a managed private shared space that starts at
$1 per person per month. Isn't the Internet a grand experiment in free
data processing? Nevertheless, it is great to be able to try something
out risk-free.

If you want to get started with any of these technologies, realize
that you are going to have to address the people issues first, and
figure out how to build the best work teams that will want to
collaborate with each other rather than send email attachments back
and forth.

Do let me know of your own suggestions and what has worked and hasn't
for your collaborations. And if you want me to come speak to your
company about these and other technologies, you can download my slide
deck here (it is very much a work in progress) and see if it would be
appropriate.
http://www.slideshare.net/davidstrom