The idea of document sharing is changing and improving very quickly. Have you ever tried editing Word documents with a couple other editors? It’s not THAT bad when you’re all using a compatible copy of MS Word. How about when you start co-editing with open-source fanatics who only use OpenOffice / AbiWord? That’s when you start noticing that things you have changed are returning back to you in the next version with the same problem you changed in the first place! I’ve seen this happen way too often in my experience, and more frequently when you are including unique fonts, graphics, clip art, tables, and bullets! Besides the discrepancies amongst the different document editors, the process of editing in “markup mode” with red lines and words everywhere can be a bit daunting. Moreover, these days you might start editing a document at work, then go home, only to find that you forgot to email yourself the document to finish at home. For these reasons, the idea of “collaborative document sharing” has sprung up as a movement with quite a popular following. Let’s take a look at some of the options we have for online document collaboration.

A few years ago, Google stepped its foot into the document / word-processing arena with its own Google Docs. I’m not sure if this was necessarily the first, but it was the first that I had seen. The collaboration features of Google Docs are pretty good. I have used it extensively to do real-time collaboration – you can see the other editor’s changes in real-time! This feature is pretty cool and works well if you are only collaborating with another person. I don’t know how well it works when you have more than 2 editors. Another great feature of Google Docs is that it is already integrated into Gmail. This makes it a breeze to invite a Gmail user to be an editor. My only gripe with Google Docs is that, just like OpenOffice, it sometimes interprets MS Word .doc files a little differently than Microsoft products would. This makes it difficult to use Google Docs in a situation where the final product must look perfect. But, for a free product, it’s pretty amazing what Google Docs offers. I’m sure the Google team is working hard to improve the compatibility of their service with the Microsoft suite of products.

More recently, I have heard many good things about the collaboration tools in Box.net. According to their website, “Box not only lets you store files in a single location, it also makes it a snap to organize, share, and archive all your documents and media. Now it’s easy to keep all your documents relevant, up-to-date, and easily accessible from anywhere.” Besides tracking and versioning of single documents, Box.net offers the tracking of entire folders of files. This is very helpful for project collaboration, and Box.net’s tools are especially attractive from a project management prospective. For example, you can set up notifications so that you will be notified every time someone edits a file. You can also set access rights, to control which users can view and edit files. Unfortunately, I have not used Box.net myself, so I don’t know how well it opens Microsoft files. Lastly, an important consideration when choosing Box.net is the price! While Box.net has a free version, this version has very limited storage and features. Business accounts start at $15 per month per user.

Enter – Docs.com

Docs.com is the Microsoft FUSE project with Facebook integration, and was the main reason that I wanted to write this article! It is still in BETA, and although I have not used it much and already gotten many 404 ERRORS, I am pretty excited to see how it will develop. Right off the bat, because it is built off of Microsoft Office 2010, it should be fully compatible with all MS Office files! This is a huge head start, because of the dominance of Microsoft Office. In addition, the Facebook integration should allow effortless adoption by the new generation of Facebookers, (more than 400 million at the time of this article)!

It will definitely be interesting to see how Google Docs responds to Docs.com, and which service users prefer to use. With this new wave of “social collaboration”, is there still a need for expensive suits of products like MS Office? Or, is that fading out as well? I guess we’ll have to wait and see!