Journal 2: Document Sharing, Web 2.0

In this times where everybody have busy schedules it is hard to reunite with classmates or coworkers to work in project that requires us to work together. For those people and many others electronic collaboration documents are a great option. Electronic collaboration documents are online applications similar to Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Although you don’t have all features as in those programs, the WebPages that offer collaborative documents offer enough features to have a nice finished document.

With collaborative documents, unlike other applications, you can upload documents and edit them and save them online or save documents created in these online applications and save them in a format that can be opened in the most common programs as Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. And since you can save these documents online you can access and edit them from anywhere. Another great point of collaborative documents is that you can, as the name says, create a document and invite other people to be able to edit that document at any time from anywhere. With collaborative document people can work in the same document at the same time. Before collaborative documents working in projects or reports which required people to contribute to develop a document was rather confusing and a long process since usually you had to send them by email and wait for the others to review, comment and make changes, which was quite hard to manage. In general collaborative documents is a great tool for teacher, students and all people that what to be able to create, edit and access their document from any where they have internet access.

Before I took this class I didn’t know there were these kinds of application offered online, at least not for free. In this class I was introduces to my first collaborative documents application offered by google.com, I was quite impressed that our technology is this advance. How ever, form the tool discussion treads I learned that there are many other sites that offer applications for collaborating and sharing application, many of those for free, which would be great for students. Some of those pages are:
YourDraft (http://www.yourdraft.com/) which is a WYSWYG online editor which allows you to save and share and publish as HTML, it does NOT save previous versions. The good thing about this site is that you don’t have to register and you can give the right to other to edit or only read your page and add replies.
ZOHO (http://writer.zoho.com/) has many similarities to the application google.com offers but there are some applications that are not offered in google.com. Some of the applications in Zoho can be added to the windows office toolbar to enable quick upload. One new application that google.com doesn’t have but that may be very useful is Zoho virtual meeting.
Writeboard.com is like a wiki.
writewith.com and writeboard.com are online collaborative word processing.
YouFig.com offers is collaborative applications, but unlike other you have two windows one where you can hold a discussing on the document you are editing and in the other window you have the actual document. The documents can be edit and save as html or text files. You can put pictures and videos to you documents. Each document can be collaborated by 8 people.

Other web pager that offer collaborative applications are
Think Freehttp://www.thinkfree.com/common/main.tfoScribble Wikihttp://scribblewiki.com/main.phpSkrblhttp://www.skrbl.com/
and
http://www.stixy.com/
http://www.spruz.com/