Printer Friendly Version

For most users of the popular word processing applications, they fall short in one important area: the ability to collaborate within the programs is awful.

Most users don't take advantage of features such as the ability to annotate a document, and the closest thing to collaboration they have is e-mail. Anyone who has attempted to collaborate on a document via e-mail knows what a mess it can become when multiple versions start floating around as attachments.

Finding an answer to this document collaboration problem is a popular hunt these days. NextPage offers a way to track Microsoft Office documents and their revisions using a central system. Microsoft's new Office Live may hold some promise, but it was just announced yesterday.

There's a new crop of players tackling this problem using online word processing and centralized storage that lets users create, share, and edit documents online. The main advantages are the central storage, which lets multiple users access the documents; and the revision tracking, which helps you keep track of the document's lifecycle.

I took three such programs out for a test drive: Writeboard, Writely, and Zoho Writer. Each program was used to write its corresponding portion of this article. The fact that they appear here at all means I was able to create and retrieve the content. That's a good start.

Writeboard

Simplicity is a recurring theme in Writeboard. Writeboards are easy to create; just supply a name for your Writeboard, a password, and an e-mail address. They even make it easy to skip the terms of use. You can get right to work.

Article Tools

Print this article E-mail this article Discuss this article Related resources

Where's the Formatting?
One of the first things you'll notice about Writeboard is how plain it appears. It's just a big, blank text-entry window in your browser. There are a few hints on how to format your text on the right side, and a link you can click to open a window with more formatting functions — such as headlines, links, images, etc.

This is where Writeboard deviates from the simplicity. You don't need to know HTML. Writeboard has its own syntax that's not difficult to understand, but it's not something you've used anywhere else either. Want to insert a Web link? There's no <a href> tag, but rather, a link works like this: "Intranet Journal":http://www.intranetjournal.com.

Once you've created a Writeboard, you get an e-mail with a URL where you can find it, and the password. It's important you hang on to this e-mail because when you return to the Writeboard site, it doesn't remember you or your Writeboards. You can give Writeboard your e-mail address and it will e-mail you a list of the Writeboards you've created. The e-mail is immediate, but it's still not very convenient.

There's plenty to like about Writeboard though. I like how it conveniently displays the different versions of the document on the right side. There's an RSS feed for each document, so you can have changes delivered to your RSS reader. You can easily compare versions and see changes highlighted. The comment feature tells you how long ago the comment was made and what version was being viewed when the comment was made. Once you're done, you can download the Writeboard as a .txt or HTML file.

If you like simplicity and need basic document creation and collaboration functionality, Writeboard will probably suit you just fine.

Writely

Writely is a monster, and I mean that in a good way. It uses the trendy AJAX programming technique to deliver a fully functional word processing interface. When I clicked on my e-mail from Writely to retrieve my notes, I was immediately sent to a list of my documents.

Writely is in beta and it's free, but after perusing the FAQ it sounds like you can expect certain functionality will require some type of premium account in the future. That's understandable. There's a lot of functionality in here for free.

A handy toggle switch in Writely lets you switch between WYSIWYG and a view of the HTML of your document. You can easily preview the document. You can save it as Word or a Zip file. You can even do many of the little thing offline word processors let you do, like a word count. Like Writeboard, the documents have their own RSS feed.

Images and tables can be added to Writely documents and moved around just like in Microsoft Word. There's a good spellcheck, which even catches the name "Writely."

Here's a neat feature we didn't see in Writeboard: you can create content in Writely to add to your blog, which works with most popular blogging software. Most bloggers have Web-based access to their blogs anyway, so I don't know how often this would come into play, but it's nice to see they're keeping up with the times.

When you publish your document with Writely, you have the choice of publishing openly or privately, the latter of which allows only a few people to see it. Simply publishing the document gives people a view-only mode. You select your collaborators from an address book by e-mail address. You're told when someone is editing the document simultaneously. As the document creator, you can remove collaborators from the document, but other people can't remove you.

When organizing multiple documents, you use tags instead of folders. You can also put little stars next to document names to help keep track of them.

Go to page: 1 2

Printer Friendly Version