Having trouble collaborating with multiple users online? Build your own wiki.
When I got my MBA, for one class I was part of a virtual team of five. One member was in Bosnia, one in Singapore, and three of us scattered across the U.S. Every week we wrote a paper using Microsoft Word’s track changes feature and email. That was my first truly global collaboration, but there weren’t great tools readily available.
Last time, I introduced collaboration software and the open source peer to peer althernative to Groove, Collanos. There are online collaboration alternatives, many use the Web. In fact, there are a lot of online collaboration tools on the Web.
For most people, collaboration is a way to work on a document together. Emailing drafts works, but there are problems keeping track of two people editing the document roughly at the same time. Plus the emails really start to multiply.
One alternative is to use a wiki. Take a look at this video on wiki’s that shows how they can reduce the email storm:
There are a lot of free wiki sites like PBwiki or WikiDot. For more options Google “free wiki”. A wiki lets you collaborate on some editing and gives you a place to put supplemental files.
Another option is to use one of the many on-line document creation tools like Google Docs, Zoho or Buzzword. All three let you share a document with other users so they can edit the document too. And since Buzzword is part of Acrobat.com, up to 3 people can go on-line together and share their desktops and editing.
