What's So Difficult about Online Document Collaboration?

Who really likes using Microsoft Word to collaborate on documents? While Word has powerful built-in collaboration features, after a few rounds of edits the documents become unwieldy to read. Reviewers send an email explaining why they made a certain change, along with comments made inline in the file. By the end of the process you have 20 versions of the same file from 4 different people and 78 emails discussing the content.

So-called Web 2.0 application developers saw that this process was “broken” and attempted to find a better way. Writely was one of the first applications to offer online document collaboration in a central place. It was quickly snatched up by Google and is now the “Docs” part of Google Docs & Spreadsheet. There are others…Zoho Writer, Approver, QuickDoc Review, SyncroEdit, Writeboard, to name a few. Coventi Pages is a new application in this space that shows a great deal of promise.

Despite the proliferation of these tools, users are still emailing Word files back and forth and the concept of online document collaboration hasn’t caught on in the mainstream. What is the barrier to acceptance of these tools outside of the Enterprise? It goes beyond just “getting the word out,” no pun intended, that these services exist.

Teams I’ve worked on have tried many, if not all, of these services. After editing a document or two, people invariably fall back into old habits of shuffling Word files back and forth. Why?

Here are a few theories based on personal experience as a freelancer and telecommuter. Feel free to add your own in the comments. Perhaps the perfect online document collaboration tool is already out there…or maybe it’s waiting to be developed. Or, it could be that like a face-to-face conversation, the web can bridge some gaps but will never be a fully accepted substitute.

Sudden shift in work habits: First of all, it’s yet another login ID and password for the user to remember. Despite the WYSIWYG editing bar present in most of these applications, there is an adjustment period for people who are used to a certain look and feel from Word. The more a web application can mimic the editing tools of Word (pre 2007) and gently ease users into change, the easier it will be for teams to accept. This is a barrier for mainstream acceptance of Writeboard, for example, which does not have any familiar editing tools.

Offline access: Once a file is saved back to .doc format, it has lost its ability to be edited by the team. Zoho attempts to bridge this gap with an Office plug-in (Windows only) that allows you to edit documents in Word and save back to Zoho Writer’s workspace. Still, if there is no access to the internet, there’s no retrieving a file.

Printing flexibility and features: Some people still prefer to review documents on paper, instead of the screen. They want to visualize how the document will look in its final version. How many times do you edit text in an online field, but miss a typo until you preview with formatting and background colors? When a file is printed from a web-based document collaboration application, it loses the headers and footers it may have had in Word. Adding appropriate page and column breaks is an important part of the editing process that is lost online, as is a final page count.

Inline comments: Coventi Pages is a welcome addition in this space, as it introduces real-time collaboration in teams. Sometimes you have to explain why you’ve made a change before your team will accept the change. The ability to “write in the margins” about a specific section of the document is present in Word, and was missing in these web-based applications until Coventi came along. Our team is currently working on documents in Coventi for this reason alone. However, it’s been slow going for all the other reasons mentioned in this post.

Speed and Accessibility: A version of Word runs on every computer made in the past 20+ years. Despite its bloat, it runs quickly. Users complain that editing in a web application is much slower than editing in Word.

Selective edits: In Word, the manager (or team member who has the “final word”) has the ability to selectively accept or reject team member edits. Online document collaboration tools offer an “all or nothing” approach. You can roll back to previous versions of the document, but there’s no way to easily take paragraph 1 from Sue and paragraph 2 from Jane.

Training and adoption: Children are learning how to use Word in elementary school. It’s a tough habit to break. While web applications are intuitive, there is a learning curve that teams may not want to take the time to navigate. There has to be buy-in from the entire team, not just the person who discovered the tool and wants to use it. Plus, a web worker may receive one file from Google Docs & Spreadsheets, another from Coventi or Zoho. Every interface is different, with its own quirks. Keeping track of which files are on which service can be a challenge.

How are your teams using online document collaboration? Let us know what makes the process work for you, or not.

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