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Sharing is Caring

By Kevin

Long ago project teams in an organization is a nasty idea because it generates many revisions of a single document. The hierarchal system where everyone trashes things out in a meeting then the one in-charge pens the relevant document to be corrected by his supervisor before sending it to the typist is thus preferred. Why would project teams produce many revisions of a document? It's because the one in-charge simply pens a draft to be reviewed by everyone. The first would edit the draft, send it to the typist and then the next would edit again and send it to the typist so the rest can see the document better. The result was stacks of older versions of the same document. Whenever computers helped, it was churning more versions of the same document file and it was even more confusing because no one could be sure who edited what first.

Online word processing thus became an important innovation in the field of collaborative work management and coordination. I highly recommend the use of Google Documents or Zoho Documents to generate drafts of documents for all team members to review and edit by a certain date. It typically entails simple steps of creating a document on your account, naming it and pasting the content you have prepared into the document before sharing it with your co-workers by typing in their email addresses. Before co-workers can view or edit your draft they must of course have an account with the platforms you are using.

You can assign access rights to the different users based on their work in your project team. You could allow an advisor to have only viewing rights and not editing rights. You could give only certain team mates the rights to share the document with further people.

More importantly there's a record of the revision histories of each document, you can track back exactly what was done to the document by which user and you can recover an older version if necessary. This is a valuable function for project teams who are hoping to see how much work each member contribute. For Secondary School students, you can use this platform for discussion, typing your take on your project issues and then saving the document to allow others to add on their side of the story. For Junior College and University students, these platforms are valuable systems for collaborative research papers and reports.

Note that the documents are not restricted to Word processing. Spreadsheets and even presentations can now be shared and collaboratively edited or worked on. This means that more people can contribute to a single piece of work at the same time without passing floppy disk or external hard disk or thumb-drives around and accumulating copies of different version of the same documents. At the same time collection of information can be sped up; for example, when I form a new project group and have to work with strangers introduced by friends or former co-workers, I simply create a contact list spreadsheet and share it with those people involved, getting them to fill up their contact information in the list. This way, compilation of these contact details are speedy and when everyone is done, everyone have a copy of the list.

The age when you have keep many documents secret and allow viewing to only certain exclusive people are more or less over. Information now come from so many different directions and sources that only collaborative work can achieve an ideal aggregation of information. Such work can only be done quickly using these online tools. Next step is about identifying the best collaborative tools that would tailor best to your project. I'll provide reviews into specific collaborative tools and make more concrete recommendations in the articles to come.