It’s no longer such a strange scenario. Work on a project begins on one person’s computer before it’s sent on via email for other people to weigh in and make changes.
“This can lead to duplication and someone ends up doing the work twice, which can make agreement difficult,” says Herbert Braun of c’t, a German computer magazine.
Help might come in the form of collaborative office services, which streamline the workflow for everything from word processing to creating spreadsheets, says Braun. This kind of collaborative work is fairly commonplace among software developers and freelancers. But now it’s getting easier for laymen to do the same.
“Students now have the opportunity to do homework together from various locations, for example,” says Braun.
Google Docs is one free collaborative online service. “It was the first important online office application that was easy to use for private users,” says Braun. Zoho, a competitor, offers a service of similar quality.
Google Docs allows any user, regardless of time or place, to work together in flexible teams says Madeleine von Mohl, one of the founders of Betahaus Berlin, an open collaborative office space for the creative-minded. Documents are processed together while calendars are kept jointly. The Spreadsheet program is used to manage online questions or invitations.
Microsoft also recently introduced a web-based version of Office. Office Web Apps allows users to work on documents in their web browser, explains Mark Perseke from Netzwelt.de, a German online magazine. Those documents can then be made accessible to other users.
“The point here is not collaboration, but access and the ability to make changes from any computer with an Internet connection.” Microsoft Web Apps is free for users who are registered with Windows Live.
Formatting problems are unusual in online collaboration. Documents retain their formatting during export even if multiple users on a variety of…