Time for Online Collaboration

With Acrobat, Writely, or Office Groove

By: Eric Durrand 

The concept of a document has been transformed in the past two decades. From printed information that changed very rarely, and was stored at a specific places in care of a specific person, documents have now become media-rich, easily changed and duplicated, and most important of all: shareable.

Document creation and managements suites, together with the advent of broadband internet have brought a wealth of possibilities to our everyday common documents. You can now publish them online in minutes, send them anywhere in seconds, get feedback from co-workers, track changes, and even debate and collaborate in real time online!

Three document management and collaboration solutions, each special in its own right, offer you the possibility to do more with your documents.

Adobe Acrobat 8.0, launched September 18^th, is a powerful document creation and sharing environment. It offers you the ability to easily create PDF documents from virtually any application. PDF documents look the same on every platform, version, and device, and can include interactive elements such as movies, or forms that can be filled out online. The suite includes some very interesting collaboration tools for schools: users around the world can quickly add sticky notes, marker highlights, bookmarks, stamps (such as Classified, or Feedback Wanted), and even colorful “pencil” marks. They can track each other comments, reply, and engage in discussion about the document, viewable from the document itself.

The new version includes some powerful tools that allow colleagues to not only collaborate online in real time, but to actually hold a video conference meeting “around” the document, discussing the changes as they’re being made. This is an effective way to discuss grading, decide on policy papers, class materials, schedules, etc. It’s also a great way to provide forms for download and printing, class sources, even assignment papers.

 

Writely.com, recently purchased by Google and released as a free service to the public, is an altogether different approach to online collaboration. Writely is web-based, which means anyone with a browser can access it, HTML based – which means that you can publish them online in seconds, and simple – which means you need not bother with dozens of functions that you will never use, but also cannot create as complex and media-rich documents as in Word, Acrobat, or other document creation tools.

Writely, however, is extremely powerful in its own way. It automatically tracks versions of documents, allowing you to go back and compare any two versions from any time in the past. It allows you to invite collaborators and see the changes they make in real time. It has a powerful search engine and tagging system that allows you to find a document out of hundreds in seconds, and it has a powerful backup and automatic save program that virtually insures that your information will not be lost.

 

Microsoft Office 2007 Groove is a unique collaboration tool recently released in BETA mode, and which will be included in the Office 2007 suite. The suite allows multiple teams to create “working spaces” and share the tools they need for a specific project. Tools include file sharing, project management, live meetings management including video conferencing and voice, forum discussions, a whiteboard tool, and more.

Groove works using a regular internet connection, saving the files on each of the individual PCs rather than on a central server, and pushing the changes made to the information since the last connection to each user when he logs in. Users can create an unlimited number of work spaces, each centered around a team, project, or task. Groove also allows you to see who’s working on what at any point, and chat with co-workers using a built in messenger.

 

Whether you’re using a free online tool, or an expensive document management suite, opening up to the idea of live online collaboration will liberate your documents from their bonds of time and space, and allow them to grow organically based on users comments, client feedback, and changing needs. Document management and collaboration tools offer a great way of taking important information out of people’s minds, and into a shared repository of tips, comments, interpretations, and positions. Are you ready to collaborate online?