December 15, 2009

With cloud computing continuing its reach into areas once dominated by desktop applications, it's a great time to consider how your small business could benefit from online collaboration tools for producing great documents. Whether it's a proposal, press release, manual, or other type of communication or documentation, there are some great and relatively easy to use tools out there to help your team prepare it.

We've looked at the bigger picture in team collaboration tools before, including everything from private group messaging to shared contacts to project management. We've also looked at how to collaboratively create presentations using online tools as well. But if you need to get a group together specifically to build a document, you'll want to know what types of options are available. Happily, the cost of many of these tools is downright cheap compared to desktop alternatives, or even free. 

Wikis

Wiki software allows multiple users to collaborate on interlinked web documents relatively easily using a WYSIWYG editor or a lightweight markup language. The most famous example is Wikipedia, a user-editable knowledge base that has quickly grown into the world's largest encyclopedia since its founding in 2001.

Wikis are an excellent choice for creating complex documentation, since pages and topics can be very easily linked together to make a navigable document structure. Typically, built-in search functionality allows needed information to be found quickly from within the archives. Among the other benefits of a wiki are version histories, in which copies of previous edits to a particular page are saved in case anything needs to be rolled back or recovered. Some systems allow the creation of fine sets of permission structures to ensure that only those who are allowed to view and/or edit certain sections are able to do so.

Beyond documentation, wikis can also often be a good choice for collaborating on single standalone documents, particularly if those documents need to live online. However, some wiki systems have export features as well that allow you to convert an online wiki page into a PDF, text file or other portable document format.

There are a number of options for using a wiki in your organization, from hosting free and open source software packages on your own servers to low cost hosted wikis and fully-supported solutions scalable from small business all the way up to the enterprise. Have a look at MediaWiki for a self-hosted solution (this is the software that powers Wikipedia), PBWorks for a hosted solution, and Socialtext for a supported solution that can scale as your company grows. For many more options, check out an excellent comparison chart of wiki software and the WikiMatrix wiki comparison site.

Collaborative Document Editors

If your needs are simpler than extensive documentation or information gathering and you just need a way to collaborate on essentially standalone documents, you might consider one of the many excellent collaborative online document editors out there. Perhaps the most famous among them is Google Documents. Here you can make use of a rather robust WYSIWYG visual editor to prepare documents that are shareable in either view or edit levels with whoever needs to have access. With the recent addition of a shared folders feature, it's even easier to manage collaboration and access among one or several sets of team members.

Google's not the only game in town, however, and it's worth exploring alternative options including the also free Zoho Writer, the online word processing component of Zoho Applications, a full-featured collaboration suite that even features full integration with Google Docs for a multi-tiered open approach to online collaboration tools.

Other notable options worth checking out in the online document preparation category include Adobe's Buzzword and 37 Signals' Writeboard, which uses a wiki-like syntax but is primarily geared towards creating standalone documents. If your business is already operating in the Microsoft Office realm, it's also worth looking at Office Live Workspace which offers a check-out/check-in approach to document collaboration for groups, although your team would actually use the corresponding desktop apps to view and edit documents. The next version, Microsoft Office 2010, will also add a native web apps component to the office suite and should be worth checking out when it launches next year. 

Google Wave

If your small business already works in the realm of cutting edge technology, or if your company culture includes cultivating an adventurous spirit, it's definitely worth giving this innovative new communication and document-creation tool a try. Google Wave is part e-mail, part wiki, part instant messaging and part social networking -- it offers an unprecedented opportunity to collaborate with peers in real-time, where edits and additions can be seen as they're made. 

Google Wave provides basic document formatting features like headlines, font sizes and styles, alignment, etc. Replies can be threaded and nested many levels deep, with the entire progress of each Wave able to be played back in sequential order to see how the document unfolded. You also have powerful ways to bring in and display outside information into a Wave with extensions dubbed gadgets and robots. Since anyone can create these extensions, not only is there a robust community already making useful apps, but your business could potentially create its own custom extensions if and when needed as well.

It's certainly still the early days for Google Wave, and because it's in private beta it may prove difficult to get your entire group access to the tool. But it's an incredibly promising medium that forward-thinking companies may want to experiment with. Even if it only provides utility in the drafting and brainstorming stage for a completed documented that is eventually finalized using other tools, Google Wave is an impressive and unique method for team collaboration on information in real-time.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Francisblack

Join the conversation ( 6 )

• Fabrice Talbot 1 year 8 months and 17 days ago

  

  I think business need more structured collaboration, rather then wikis. Each team member has certain roles, so the privileges shouldn't be the same for every collaborator involved.
  
  But, of course, that's just my opinion. Each business has it's own needs. If you ever elaborate a document collaboration tools list, please feel free to check us out: http://www.agilewords.com - We just went into public beta!

• ALLEN FALCON 2 years 0 months and 27 days ago

  

  One of the challenges of document collaboration is that many of these solutions require users to re-learn the productivity tools they use most often.
  
  We have been running OffiSync (http://buyoffisync.com), which lets us work in MS Office and use Google Docs and Google Sites for seamless collaboration. OffiSync adds a toolbar to Word, Excel, and Powerpoint that gives us access to our Google Docs and Sites as if they were another server on our network. It also lets us find content and images via Google search without having to open a browser.
  
  The subscription is $12 per user per year, but there are usually discounts available.

• David Gildeh 2 years 1 months and 21 days ago

  

  I believe what all businesses, but especially small businesses need is an integrated set of tools all in one place - a collaboration suite. That is the approach we've taken with our platform SambaJAM (www.sambajam.com) - providing secure configurable virtual workspaces that provide document management, wikis, disucssion forums and group calendars all in one place.
  
  The trouble with the tools listed above is you have to go to each tool for different parts of the collaboration process. The majority of information is still created in, and shared as electronic documents, so wikis, which at best allow you to attach documents to a wiki page, are a poor substitute for this.
  
  Before choosing a tool, try and pick one that brings several collaboration tools into one place, so you only need one account and can be sure all your information is secure in one place and not spread all over the place. Many tools like SambaJAM integrate with Zoho and Google Docs so you can still use these services but ensure the end document is still safely stored in one place.

• Matt Wiseley 2 years 1 months and 22 days ago

  

  "Wikis are an excellent choice for creating complex documentation" - I couldn't agree more. As more technical writers grasp the concept of using a wiki platform as a replacement for both authoring and publishing, the value will click.

• Martin Lindeskog 2 years 1 months and 23 days ago

  

  It would be great if CommonCraft made a video on how to use Google Wave! ;)

• David Corcoran 2 years 1 months and 23 days ago

  

  One thing to keep in mind after selecting a collaboration tool is user adoption. It's important to make sure you communicate the value of the new collaboration tool & ensure each user fully understands how to use it. Not a bad idea as well, to have follow-up training, so you can address any concerns that users may be having.