Regards,
Super J.

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

@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.

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.

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

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.

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.

“…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? ;)

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.