A common theme in the blogsphere lately is that collaboration should be easier. Many attempts are being made. Wiki, CMS, some blogservices, file-sharing, on-line word-processors, and many other solutions are being experimented with. There are arguments for all applications being ported to the web, and former geeks who explain why that is not possible, or at least inconvenient. No application should require you to be online, but all applications should allow you to share all your data between multiple computers, and you should have access to the applications you have purchased on any machine that you use. More on that in a latter post. Back to collaboration….
Michael Sampson suggests that IT stop spending money on incremental upgrades that do not add value to the business process, and invest in collaboration software instead. In a later post he encourages Microsoft to make collaboration easier in the next version of Office (for Mac?). The hype around “Office 12″ has been about the UI. Hopefully this will reduce the file size and all the parts and pieces that seem to keep getting lost or forgotten. The new UI might even make a transition the web possible. But it does not have to. The new killer app I am looking for is one where all documents are accessible from any computer, are easy to find, and easy to edit as a team.
What about you? How much of your document creation involves other people, or working on several different machines?
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