Collaborate Using Online Tools
Let's Get Together, Now
I hold out hope that the Sosius service, which currently doesn't offer this option, will
Share and Share Alike
As a writer, one of the most frustrating parts of my existence is the editing process--not because I think I am above it, but because it's hard to track revisions or to make comments on those changes. Yet, collaboration is about group input. So, document sharing and commenting should be something your team considers carefully.
Most of the tools considered
For example, a marketing brochure could be reviewed by a specific team member first and then passed along to someone else for
If you haven't invested in desktop productivity tools and need some basic software for doing this, Central Desktop and Google Sites include their own applications for writing memos and documents, creating spreadsheets, or pulling together presentations. The Central Desktop applications are quite full-featured and are delivered through a relationship with a company called EditGrid. What I really liked about these applications was how quickly you could use them in context. It's quite simple, for example, to create a new spreadsheet sharing some quick financial information. (You can import an existing Excel spreadsheet if you'd like, which is also nice.) I found the Central Desktop spreadsheets to be more intuitive than the Google alternative.
Up-to-the-Minute Updates
To keep a project on track, you need to know when one of your colleagues has added an event or meeting to your group calendar or made comments related to a team document. That's why you should look for a service that integrates closely with your existing e-mail account and calendar--without requiring you to log in to your collaboration account if you aren't inclined.
Both the Sosius and Central Desktop services, for example, allow team members to send updates and attachments to a group. The updates are recorded within the appropriate workspace without requiring the member to sign in, an important feature for supporting offline work. (Other services may allow this, but the feature wasn't readily apparent.) Of course, this sort of alerting capability also works in reverse. So, when someone has altered a process or document within a workspace, team members know what's going on.
Visual cues about upcoming project deadlines might also be important for your team. Most of these services include some sort of task manager within the main dashboard where team members can see when things are due--and when something might be slipping.
As someone who has experienced her fair share of calendar synchronization problems (I juggle two different work calendars that don't ever seem to match up quite right), I urge you also to consider where and how you will manage your group's schedule as well as your own private appointments.
If your team is already using Microsoft Outlook, you should pick a service that supports
Google Sites and Basecamp, on the other hand, focus on people that don't have an Outlook legacy to worry about. Google, not surprisingly, emphasizes its calendar application, although it also supports Apple iCal. Basecamp allows users to subscribe to Milestones alerts from The Backpack Calendar (created by parent developer 37signals), or from iCal, Mozilla Calendar, or other calendars that support the iCalendar standard. If your collaboration service will become your central calendar, make sure it can support the following functions: marking certain events private, creating recurring or repeat meetings, delegating event creation to someone else, and publishing to an online location
One additional application touted by Basecamp, but not the other services, is a time tracker that allows project members to formally track the time associated with certain tasks. This not only helps with billing appropriately, but it can also help postmortem when a team is gathering best practices information that can be applied to future projects.
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