What’s So Difficult about Online Document Collaboration?
April 19th, 2007 (12:00pm) Judi Sohn 17 Comments
Who really likes using Microsoft Word to collaborate on documents? While Word has powerful built-in collaboration features, after a few rounds of edits the documents become unwieldy to read. Reviewers send an email explaining why they made a certain change, along with comments made inline in the file. By the end of the process you have 20 versions of the same file from 4 different people and 78 emails discussing the content.
So-called Web 2.0 application developers saw that this process was “broken” and attempted to find a better way. Writely was one of the first applications to offer online document collaboration in a central place. It was quickly snatched up by Google and is now the “Docs” part of Google Docs & Spreadsheet. There are others…Zoho Writer, Approver, QuickDoc Review, SyncroEdit, Writeboard, to name a few. Coventi Pages is a new application in this space that shows a great deal of promise.
Despite the proliferation of these tools, users are still emailing Word files back and forth and the concept of online document collaboration hasn’t caught on in the mainstream. What is the barrier to acceptance of these tools outside of the Enterprise? It goes beyond just “getting the word out,” no pun intended, that these services exist.
Teams I’ve worked on have tried many, if not all, of these services. After editing a document or two, people invariably fall back into old habits of shuffling Word files back and forth. Why?
Here are a few theories based on personal experience as a freelancer and telecommuter. Feel free to add your own in the comments. Perhaps the perfect online document collaboration tool is already out there…or maybe it’s waiting to be developed. Or, it could be that like a face-to-face conversation, the web can bridge some gaps but will never be a fully accepted substitute.
Sudden shift in work habits: First of all, it’s yet another login ID and password for the user to remember. Despite the WYSIWYG editing bar present in most of these applications, there is an adjustment period for people who are used to a certain look and feel from Word. The more a web application can mimic the editing tools of Word (pre 2007) and gently ease users into change, the easier it will be for teams to accept. This is a barrier for mainstream acceptance of Writeboard, for example, which does not have any familiar editing tools.
Offline access: Once a file is saved back to .doc format, it has lost its ability to be edited by the team. Zoho attempts to bridge this gap with an Office plug-in (Windows only) that allows you to edit documents in Word and save back to Zoho Writer’s workspace. Still, if there is no access to the internet, there’s no retrieving a file.
Printing flexibility and features: Some people still prefer to review documents on paper, instead of the screen. They want to visualize how the document will look in its final version. How many times do you edit text in an online field, but miss a typo until you preview with formatting and background colors? When a file is printed from a web-based document collaboration application, it loses the headers and footers it may have had in Word. Adding appropriate page and column breaks is an important part of the editing process that is lost online, as is a final page count.
Inline comments: Coventi Pages is a welcome addition in this space, as it introduces real-time collaboration in teams. Sometimes you have to explain why you’ve made a change before your team will accept the change. The ability to “write in the margins” about a specific section of the document is present in Word, and was missing in these web-based applications until Coventi came along. Our team is currently working on documents in Coventi for this reason alone. However, it’s been slow going for all the other reasons mentioned in this post.
Speed and Accessibility: A version of Word runs on every computer made in the past 20+ years. Despite its bloat, it runs quickly. Users complain that editing in a web application is much slower than editing in Word.
Selective edits: In Word, the manager (or team member who has the “final word”) has the ability to selectively accept or reject team member edits. Online document collaboration tools offer an “all or nothing” approach. You can roll back to previous versions of the document, but there’s no way to easily take paragraph 1 from Sue and paragraph 2 from Jane.
Training and adoption: Children are learning how to use Word in elementary school. It’s a tough habit to break. While web applications are intuitive, there is a learning curve that teams may not want to take the time to navigate. There has to be buy-in from the entire team, not just the person who discovered the tool and wants to use it. Plus, a web worker may receive one file from Google Docs & Spreadsheets, another from Coventi or Zoho. Every interface is different, with its own quirks. Keeping track of which files are on which service can be a challenge.
How are your teams using online document collaboration? Let us know what makes the process work for you, or not.
17 Comments Post your own comment
Projectizer From WebWorkerDaily - What’s So Difficult about Online Document Collaboration? « says: April 19th, 2007 12:26pm
[...] file. By the end of the process you have 20 versions of the same file from 4 different….. ~ Read More Posted in [...]
Jeffrey McManus says: April 19th, 2007 2:45pm
Hi Judi, this is a terrific roundup, thanks for doing it.
At Approver.com we haven’t found the notion of “yet another login and password” to be a barrier for people (if it is, then nobody’s complained about it yet). We intentionally make our registration form simple (less than 30 seconds for most people) to keep it that way.
I think that one important thing that hasn’t been mentioned often enough is the fact that lots of tools are on some kind of crusade to get people to work in the browser. When we started Approver.com we didn’t even have an in-browser editor, but we added one because people asked us to, but just over half of our users upload files that they create in their favorite desktop apps. And they’re not just using MS Office — we have people sharing OpenOffice documents, Adobe PDFs, Photoshop images — even files from specialized applications like AutoCad. We’re not religious about getting people to adapt some radically new way of working; we’re about keeping it simple and helping people work more efficiently.
irocket says: April 19th, 2007 3:00pm
I do agree it seems to be taking people a long time to recognize there are loads of new tools and applications for working online. Of all my associates and friends and family members, There is not one, aside from myself, that is aware Google is more than a search engine, let alone the vast number of web applications such as web expressions from Microsoft. (btw Web 2.0 is just a coined phrase to describe the resurgence of web applications that are developed to produce a more seamless integration between PC and internet. It is generally used to emphasize the second generation of internet commerce/business)
“…Still, if there is no access to the internet, there’s no retrieving a file.”
~ If you didn’t have access to the internet, we wouldn’t be talking about live or online collaboration period. Of course when you log off or lose your connection there won’t be any online or live collaborating at all. There is no magical solution to maintaining your online presence when you are disconnected. People just have to practice a little acceptance of interruptions during meetings, and during online collaborating.
“When a file is printed from a web-based document collaboration application, it loses the headers and footers it may have had in Word. Adding appropriate page and column breaks is an important part of the editing process that is lost online,”
~ I don’t have this problem while using Google’s Documents and Spreadsheets. Also in Google Doc’s you can switch to html edit mode and make “certain” your margins and page breaks are accurate by entering the appropriate html tags. You can also incorporate images linked live from the web into your documents from any source that serves up the images, and the images can be resized in html edit mode or grab the edge of the image and drag to resize it. The images also print up exactly as they appear both in the edit mode as well as the preview mode. In all..stop using Word, Get a Mac.
“Inline comments: Coventi Pages is a welcome addition in this space, as it introduces real-time collaboration in teams. Sometimes you have to explain why you’ve made a change before your team will accept the change. The ability to “write in the margins” about a specific section of the document is present in Word, and was missing in these web-based applications until Coventi came along.”
~ Stop using a windows based PC and get a Mac. If you had a Mac, you could video conference with your entire team or teams at the same time you are collaborating in Google Docs and Spreadsheets, “live/real time” using [for example] iChat. (btw, if you are off-line working on your documents, then you aren’t having a real time online collaboration are you? You just have a bunch of people working by themselves on a document before they all get together at a meeting and present “their version” of the document which is really a lot of wasted energy and time separately before any real work gets done at the meeting.)
“Speed and Accessibility: A version of Word runs on every computer made in the past 20+ years. Despite its bloat, it runs quickly. Users complain that editing in a web application is much slower than editing in Word.”
~ I don’t know where you get your facts, but word does not run on a Mac unless you have the windows XP platform installed on a mac which is insane. Also the speed of the application is based on the computer’s processor speed, bus speed and available system resources which means it can run slow OR fast depending on what you have. The speed that your internet is served to you is based on the type of internet connection you have and the amount of bandwidth being used on the node you are on. I have used a cable or satellite connection to the internet and I don’t see any speed issues at all let alone as a comparison for accomplishing a collaborative document. Editing web based application documents too slow? Get a MAC! (and get off dial-up)
“Selective edits: You can roll back to previous versions of the document, but there’s no way to easily take paragraph 1 from Sue and paragraph 2 from Jane.”
~ Problem Solved, Get out of Microsoft Word, Get a MAC. Using Google Documents and Spreadsheets with iChat, you can take paragraph 1 from Sue, 2 from Jane, 3 from Bob, 4 from Steve, 5 and 6 from Blue Team and 7 from Gold team and snap their work into a nicely produced document in real time as well as use the HTML edits from Red team and the Image layout from the digital dept submission and you have a complete document. If the boss still isn’t happy, he can make the edits himself, or tell the people there in the conference to make such and such changes right now.
“Training and adoption:”
~ The whole paragraph sounds like a managerial and coordination failure from the start. Nothing to do with how the web works or how live collaborating works. (and I am pretty sure you mean adaptation or adapting, not adoption). The term collaborating doesn’t apply to just the Document. It extends to the tools being used by all the web workers, the coffee breaks, the amount of time spent on each project, etc. If there is no collaborating and organizing your tools of the trade and your efforts and time management, then why bother collaborating on a document together?
I see the entire post more as a gripe session than anything else.
Aside from my over zealous appreciation for the Mac and the solutions it provides as well as the solutions Web 2.0 applications provide [such as Google Docs and Spreadsheets], there are more solutions to the problems stated above than I think you are aware of. First and foremost, get away from Microsoft and get away from Windows Applications and Windows based PC’s. Have you ever heard the Mac Community complaining about these problems? ;)
rick gregory says: April 19th, 2007 4:47pm
Judi,
Is web based collaboration really easier though? To me, that’s the crux of the issue – yeah you have one central version, but unless the features are there to make it easy, the document may still be confusing to read and hard to edit. Simply having a central version is just one small part of the issue – figuring out how to help people go from draft through comments to final version requires far more. For example, what do you do if three people made extensive edits to the same paragraph… you like bits of what person A and C did, but want to reject person B’s edits. However, when combined, the edits from A and C may not make sense (since each was editing the draft without reference to each other’s edits. And, after combining those, B’s edits make more sense now, so you want to see those as they’d apply to the new composite paragraph.
Then you have the issue of a document being built in Word… and losing formatting or features when translated into a web editor. Not an issue for people who create the document from scratch o the web… but that’s a long ways off for most people.
Dave says: April 19th, 2007 5:29pm
As a website project manager, I recently recommended google docs spreadsheets to create a marketing matrix on a simple spreadsheet. I was excited to introduce this and may have been the start to future online collaboration. It turns out that we could not do a simple task such as change colors of text within a cell. Thumbs down. Made me look bad.
Dave says: April 19th, 2007 5:31pm
There are many, but thinkfree.com offers powerpoint as wel and all free for 1gig.
Judi Sohn says: April 19th, 2007 5:41pm
IRocket: Thanks for taking the time to comment. First of all, I AM a Mac user. Typing this on a MacBook Pro, as a matter of fact. I bought my first Mac in 1992, and my first PC running Windows in 2004. So for 12 years I used a Mac exclusively (and was a bit of a “Mac snob” while I was at it). Now my primary OS is Mac OS X and I run Windows from within Parallels. That said, the OS is irrelevant. Microsoft has had a version of Word that runs on the Mac since the beginning. If I’m not mistaken, I think Word was developed for the Mac before the PC. It doesn’t matter the operating system, the process of collaborating on a document that’s attached to an email is the same whether Word 2003 or 2004 (the Mac version) is opening the file.
The issue may be that web collaboration tools are attempting to fix a broken system with a system that’s also “broken,” except for different reasons. Getting teams to adapt to change is a challenge, regardless of whether they are PC or Mac users. While a team of Mac users on Broadband doing live collaboration via iChat sounds wonderful, that’s rarely the reality. Especially if folks on the team aren’t working in creative fields.
Reality is that Mac and PC users prefer to email files back and forth instead of working through web applications to edit documents. Online document collaboration hasn’t been embraced, and the point of this post was to illustrate some of the possible reasons why it hasn’t. As far as offline access goes, our folks will often download a file before they get on a plane, work on the edits while in flight, and then email back the file with “tracked changes” when they land. That’s not possible/easy with online collaboration tools.
Rick: You bring up a very good point, and I alluded to that when I talked about “selective edits.” We run into that issue all the time, which makes working in the web-based applications frustrating.
Franco Dal Molin says: April 19th, 2007 6:29pm
The problems are not tools and features (e.g. Word vs. Writely), but user experience (UI), offline accessibility, and how documents and document versions are being exchanged. Email is obviously the plain wrong tool for team collaboration on documents. And pure browser-based online tools have indeed a lot of shortcomings. Judi did a great job in breaking those all down. We at Collanos believe in solutions based on P2P synchronized ad hoc team workspaces. Any type of document can be exchanged securely and in context. Additional notes and discussions can be attached directly. The P2P approach supports the offline mode naturally.
Peter Lee says: April 19th, 2007 6:30pm
Hi Judi,
This is Peter Lee from coventi.com. Thanks for the great writeup about the barriers we all face as online collaboration tools. I think you’re very much on target.
In particular, it’s always hard getting a group to try something new. Especially when we’ve already got email, and more importantly when everyone else has it too.
But as you put it:
“By the end of the [document collaboration] process you have 20 versions of the same file from 4 different people and 78 emails discussing the content.”
Rick, I think you’ve drilled down on the underlying reason for all this back and forth: When you’re working with one other person, it’s easy enough to collect your thoughts and send them in an email. But add in another person, or five or ten, and the problem of getting “from draft through comments to final version” gets a lot stickier.
Changes and consensus can be worked out over email, but it’s up to the owner of the document to sift through those messages, moderate the discussion and guide the document to a final draft.
We designed Coventi Pages to make that process easier. As Judi mentioned, we started by putting comments into context, just like pen and paper. Rather than having everybody revise the text itself, the group can have a real-time discussion first, then the owner/authors can make decisions about what’s going in, with all the data organized in front of them.
There are a lot of nice things that start happening once you do this, but I’ll stop here since I don’t want to hijack Judi’s post. :) If anyone has a chance to check out our site (we also have a quick video) and wants to post to this thread though, it would be great to hear your thoughts.
And Judi, we’re glad to hear that we’ve built something useful for you and your group. We’d love to hear more about how you’re using Coventi, and more importantly, what you’d like to see from us in the future.
Yours,
Peter
peter at coventi dot com
Michael Specht says: April 19th, 2007 11:18pm
Agree collaboration for the creation of documents is a huge area for productivity improvements. One issue that is not mentioned is security of corporate information in the use of these web based tools.
Having said that not many organisations would like to find out that their confidential information is being stored in the cloud. I am sure most corporate counsels would freak if they found out.
Liz says: April 20th, 2007 8:45am
I’ll agree that the discussion of a document often seems to take precedence over the actual edits that are made, and doc owners do seem to have a difficult time choosing from the feedback cloud without hearing the rationale for each edit (especially when the edits conflict…). Coventi sounds like a great tool. I’ll be sure to check it out ASAP; my group (and every marketing team I’ve ever worked on, honestly) is still a fan of the unending Word document trail. As workgroups become more and more distributed, effective collaboration will have to arise from somewhere.
@Dave: You *can* change the text and cell background colors for a column, row, cell, or group of cells in Google Spreadsheets…that’s what those buttons with the colored checkerboards are for (to the right of the font size button). I use it for my own marketing matrix.
Kelly says: April 20th, 2007 10:05am
For me, as a freelancer, the biggest obstacle has been getting past the user interfaces with web apps. Many of the publishers and clients I work with are so heavily ingrained into MS Office and printing things out to read, that working “online” never seems to catch on.
And while readers here are all web/tech savvy, I still have many people who just don’t “get” what the web is, and what web pages are in particular. We still have hurdles to overcome in our lingo before this can become mainstream
Frank Koehntopp says: April 22nd, 2007 9:34pm
The biggest obstacle in my view is probably perceived lack of security.
Web Worker Daily » Archive Coventi Pages Shutting Down on February 1 « says: January 20th, 2008 7:39pm
[...] product offered collaboration features that were a cut above the rest. Initial reviews were encouraging, but it appears the application never generated enough buzz [...]
Mike says: March 7th, 2008 3:06pm
This post really hit home for me. I actually arrived at this post by searching for a new collaborative-friendly online word processor. Me and my girlfriend were collaborating on some grants she was writing, and the .doc’s shifting back and forth were getting out of hand. I finally convinced her to try collaborating on Google Docs (which was near impossible–she has a hatred for any new technology), and she found out that the school that her office (and internet connection) is in blocks access to docs.google.com. What a headache. Who knows if I can convince her to ever try another online app again? It looks like it might be back to document[insert-number-here].doc for me… Is this thanks to a lack of acceptance for online applications, or am I missing something? From what I’ve heard, Google has quite a bit of applicability for schools, and it’s either free or cheap.
Fred Howell says: April 19th, 2008 2:44am
A different approach for discussing documents online is offered by A.nnotate.com – you can upload a PDF or Word document, it gets displayed in the browser with all the layout (diagrams, pagination, fonts etc), and you can highlight text to attach comments. Several people can annotate the same online copy, and reply to each others comments (as note boxes, marginal notes, or footnotes). Unlike google docs / zoho etc you don’t edit the online copy, just attach notes to a read-only version, which we find reduces confusion – when you’ve gathered feedback from everyone, you incorporate the comments into the next version using your normal word processing program. To register, you just need an email address.
SuperJesus says: August 24th, 2008 11:00pm
One more option is Microsoft’s own document sharing option OfficeLive. (http://workspace.officelive.com/LearnMore) This seems to be a solid compromise option for those using Office 2003 and 2007 with tight integration with the editing tools and online versioning and sharing. It’s still a beta for now but it’s also free and looks to be pretty tight.
Regards,
Super J.