Google Documents

I know that right now all the hype is currently on google wave, but for those of us that aren't privileged to be beta testing google wave, if we want out own collaborative tool, we have to turn to Google docs. Now, Google docs is not bad. In fact, in my belief, it can change the way that businesses operate and can make things much simpler. As a college student, I find Google docs to be excellent when it comes to group projects and collaborative work. It's as easy to share documents with others, have others edit it, and all done in real time. I can make a review and type it on Google Docs, and make it accessible to anyone I want and grant them the ability to edit it. While working in group projects, all members of the group can have access to the documents, and any edits they make are saved to the server so everyone can see them.

Offices can have collaborative group discussions and share work files seamlessly with people at their workplace without having to save it and send it. There is no more need to carry around a flash-drive and keep important documents on there that could be potentially stolen or lost. I like to keep things on my documents account so that I can access my documents on any computer on campus without having to bring my macbook to school, something that people like to do but don't consider that it could potentially be dangerous. And did I mention that it's free? There are endless possibilities that you can establish using google's web application. You can create powerpoint presentations, edit excel documents, and edit word documents. Everything is done with your Google account, which you can make for free. I currently use Google docs even though I have Microsoft Office 08 on my macbook and Office 07 on my Windows partition. I prefer to use Google Docs because of how seamless it works and how well I can communicate my documents and share ideas with others.

Here is an example from a video Google posted on Youtube showing how intuitive the collaboration feature of Google Docs is.