Comments on: What's So Difficult about Online Document Collaboration?

By: SuperJesus

SuperJesus — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 06:00:59 +0000

One more option is Microsoft’s own document sharing option OfficeLive. (http://workspace.officelive.com/LearnMore) This seems to be a solid compromise option for those using Office 2003 and 2007 with tight integration with the editing tools and online versioning and sharing. It’s still a beta for now but it’s also free and looks to be pretty tight.

Regards,
Super J.

By: Fred Howell

Fred Howell — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 09:44:37 +0000

A different approach for discussing documents online is offered by A.nnotate.com - you can upload a PDF or Word document, it gets displayed in the browser with all the layout (diagrams, pagination, fonts etc), and you can highlight text to attach comments. Several people can annotate the same online copy, and reply to each others comments (as note boxes, marginal notes, or footnotes). Unlike google docs / zoho etc you don't edit the online copy, just attach notes to a read-only version, which we find reduces confusion - when you've gathered feedback from everyone, you incorporate the comments into the next version using your normal word processing program. To register, you just need an email address.

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 23:06:25 +0000

This post really hit home for me. I actually arrived at this post by searching for a new collaborative-friendly online word processor. Me and my girlfriend were collaborating on some grants she was writing, and the .doc’s shifting back and forth were getting out of hand. I finally convinced her to try collaborating on Google Docs (which was near impossible–she has a hatred for any new technology), and she found out that the school that her office (and internet connection) is in blocks access to docs.google.com. What a headache. Who knows if I can convince her to ever try another online app again? It looks like it might be back to document[insert-number-here].doc for me… Is this thanks to a lack of acceptance for online applications, or am I missing something? From what I’ve heard, Google has quite a bit of applicability for schools, and it’s either free or cheap.

By: Web Worker Daily » Archive Coventi Pages Shutting Down on February 1 «

Web Worker Daily » Archive Coventi Pages Shutting Down on February 1 « — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 03:39:57 +0000

[...] product offered collaboration features that were a cut above the rest. Initial reviews were encouraging, but it appears the application never generated enough buzz [...]

By: Frank Koehntopp

Frank Koehntopp — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 04:34:16 +0000

The biggest obstacle in my view is probably perceived lack of security.

By: Kelly

Kelly — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 17:05:57 +0000

For me, as a freelancer, the biggest obstacle has been getting past the user interfaces with web apps. Many of the publishers and clients I work with are so heavily ingrained into MS Office and printing things out to read, that working “online” never seems to catch on.

And while readers here are all web/tech savvy, I still have many people who just don’t “get” what the web is, and what web pages are in particular. We still have hurdles to overcome in our lingo before this can become mainstream

By: Liz

Liz — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 15:45:58 +0000

I’ll agree that the discussion of a document often seems to take precedence over the actual edits that are made, and doc owners do seem to have a difficult time choosing from the feedback cloud without hearing the rationale for each edit (especially when the edits conflict…). Coventi sounds like a great tool. I’ll be sure to check it out ASAP; my group (and every marketing team I’ve ever worked on, honestly) is still a fan of the unending Word document trail. As workgroups become more and more distributed, effective collaboration will have to arise from somewhere.

@Dave: You *can* change the text and cell background colors for a column, row, cell, or group of cells in Google Spreadsheets…that’s what those buttons with the colored checkerboards are for (to the right of the font size button). I use it for my own marketing matrix.

By: Michael Specht

Michael Specht — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 06:18:18 +0000

Agree collaboration for the creation of documents is a huge area for productivity improvements. One issue that is not mentioned is security of corporate information in the use of these web based tools.

Having said that not many organisations would like to find out that their confidential information is being stored in the cloud. I am sure most corporate counsels would freak if they found out.

By: Peter Lee

Peter Lee — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 01:30:13 +0000

Hi Judi,

This is Peter Lee from coventi.com. Thanks for the great writeup about the barriers we all face as online collaboration tools. I think you’re very much on target.

In particular, it’s always hard getting a group to try something new. Especially when we’ve already got email, and more importantly when everyone else has it too.

But as you put it:

“By the end of the [document collaboration] process you have 20 versions of the same file from 4 different people and 78 emails discussing the content.”

Rick, I think you’ve drilled down on the underlying reason for all this back and forth: When you’re working with one other person, it’s easy enough to collect your thoughts and send them in an email. But add in another person, or five or ten, and the problem of getting “from draft through comments to final version” gets a lot stickier.

Changes and consensus can be worked out over email, but it’s up to the owner of the document to sift through those messages, moderate the discussion and guide the document to a final draft.

We designed Coventi Pages to make that process easier. As Judi mentioned, we started by putting comments into context, just like pen and paper. Rather than having everybody revise the text itself, the group can have a real-time discussion first, then the owner/authors can make decisions about what’s going in, with all the data organized in front of them.

There are a lot of nice things that start happening once you do this, but I’ll stop here since I don’t want to hijack Judi’s post. :) If anyone has a chance to check out our site (we also have a quick video) and wants to post to this thread though, it would be great to hear your thoughts.

And Judi, we’re glad to hear that we’ve built something useful for you and your group. We’d love to hear more about how you’re using Coventi, and more importantly, what you’d like to see from us in the future.

Yours,

Peter
peter at coventi dot com

By: Franco Dal Molin

Franco Dal Molin — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 01:29:09 +0000

The problems are not tools and features (e.g. Word vs. Writely), but user experience (UI), offline accessibility, and how documents and document versions are being exchanged. Email is obviously the plain wrong tool for team collaboration on documents. And pure browser-based online tools have indeed a lot of shortcomings. Judi did a great job in breaking those all down. We at Collanos believe in solutions based on P2P synchronized ad hoc team workspaces. Any type of document can be exchanged securely and in context. Additional notes and discussions can be attached directly. The P2P approach supports the offline mode naturally.