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Sometimes the hassles of team collaboration can outweigh the benefits, as anyone who's tried to gather input from a diverse group knows. Whether you're soliciting edits for your intranet's pages or asking your team to mark up an important document, you know that gathering, examining, and inputting comments from many people can be such a chore that you wish you'd done all the work yourself.

But all that changes with Workshare 3, which unites Workshare's excellent document management products. If you haven't discovered them, Workshare DeltaView lets you compare two Word documents, so that you can instantly see what's been changed, while Workshare Project lets you strip all the hidden metadata from a Word document before you send it, so that you don't accidentally divulge more than you mean to about the document's creation. Workshare 3 combines these two products and adds a lot more.

With Workshare 3, clients who use Microsoft Office products along with Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Domino Server gain an easy way to send documents for review, then collect the changes. When you're done with a Word document, just send it to the people whom you want to review it. It doesn't matter if your various authors have Workshare 3 installed or not. When they sent their edits back, you'll be able to see all their changes at once, then accept or reject each one.

Like Workshare Project, Workshare 3 lets you remove metadata before you send a document. You can also create PDF versions of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents, so that you can send files around without giving people the chance to edit them.

Workshare 3's pricing starts at $5000 for up to 20 licenses, plus 20 percent for the mandatory first year of technical support. The software is available in a free trial download from the company's site.

If revising documents and inputting changes takes too much of your day, consider Workshare 3. You'll stop dreading document revisions and become a true king of collaboration.