With Acrobat, Writely, or Office Live Collaboration

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 your everyday 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: 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 centered on the document, viewable in 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.

A big strength of Acrobat is the security options. Documents can be signed, to make them official and legally binding, encrypted to prevent unauthorized views or revisions, and limited – to prevent unauthorized printing, screen capturing, etc. You can limit the number of times a user is a allowed to print a document, or limit the resolution of the prints to low, so that a print will never be confused with the original.

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 Live Collaboration, while still in BETA mode, promises to become a major force pushing for online document collaboration. It allows to save and share documents, calendars, client and employee information, project and tasks information – all in a single place, or in designated “Shared Sites” centered around a specific project or client. Microsoft OfficeLive works seamlessly with your Outlook calendar, task lists, and contacts, to allow you to easily share information and collaborate online.

Microsoft OfficeLive requires only an Internet Explorer browser, and while in BETA is free to use, with a base of up to 10 users and 50MB of storage space. Beyond that, the costs is raised in small increments of monthly cost.

Whether you’re using a free online tool, or an expensive business document suite, opening up to the idea of live online collaboration will liberate your documents from their bonds, and allow them to grow organically based on users comments, 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 guides, agendas, quotes, marketing materials, etc. Are you ready to collaborate online?