A teacher from a course I'm currently attending has asked me to name some good online collaboration software. In my work in politics, several associations and boards I have used a lot of online collaboration tools, and that made me question the choice of the tools selected for the course (as well as other attendees did), so here is my extra assignment, part 1 :-)
This first part is on office tools, where a lot is happening at the moment. On the online scene Google just added presentations to its suite and Yahoo have acquired Zimbra. On the offline market IBM has embraced Open Office.
I don't have a favorite tool that I use all the time, since I believe in always selecting the best tool, or collection of tools, for the job, so this will be a list of tools with comments.
Microsoft Office Live
Office Live is part of Microsoft's live initiative. It's not available in Denmark yet, but there are several screenshots available here from a current or close to current version.
It is based a lot on business, so for group collaboration, it is not a good choice.
Google Apps
This is my favorite suite. Google Apps include among other things Google Docs, Google Mail (knows as GMail) and Google Calender. The tools are quick and easy to use, yet quite powerful. You can share your items on many levels, and if you have Google Apps on your own domain, you can even choose to share only with members of that domain.
All documents have build-in revision history, that allows you to see who changed what and when.
In my opinion, Google Docs and Gmail are currently the best tools in their class. Google Calendar is on the same height as several of the competitors. The Google Apps concept is brilliant if you have your own domain, and it's free for small groups.
Zimbra
Zimbra looks more like a regular desktop application, and hence innovation in user interaction seems pretty non-existing. It is a good tool, that can do a lot of things, but it simply isn't as fast and smooth to work with as some of the competitors.
Zimbra try to focus a lot on the ability to work both online, offline and through mobile devices.
As mentioned above, they are now owned by Yahoo, and that might change the pace and roadmap in the following months.
Zoho
Zoho is another fantastic suite, where the apps integrate well with each other, and it is also just as fast as Google Apps. In some apps it also features an offline mode. This suite is new to me, but seems quite interesting.
Apart from the classic mail, word processer, spreadsheet and presentation tool, they also have tools for meetings, a notebook, a planner, a wiki, a database application tool and much more. See them all on the front page.
Especially the Wiki and the Planner tool are very interesting. The Creator also seems interesting, but that is on my list of things to play more with.
Generally, they are moving fast, and creating a lot of headlines in both business and non-business news channels. You can read about mobile support, facebook integration and a lot more here.
As a last note, they are planning to take on Google Apps with Zoho Business. This is definitely a company to watch, and maybe my new favorite.
Foldera
I have heard a lot of good things about Foldera, but I'm still waiting to be accepted as a beta user. I will update this post, after this happens.
Update: I got accepted as a beta user, but whenever I tried to use the software, either they were updating the software, a server crash or something else was wrong. Now I wanted to have a look, thinking it was more stable, and it might be, but my account has been deleted, and I have received no notification about this. For now, this will remain untested.
ThinkFree
ThinkFree is another set of tools, that try to mimic Microsoft Office and they also provide offline synchronization. They do this very well, by basing their tools on the Java platform. Java makes it look and behave like a normal application, so innovation is nowhere to be found. Also, it takes a looong time for the application to start. Compared to Google's and Zoho's 1-2 sec startup, this gets annoying pretty fast. When it is started up it works as expected. It has a tendency to crash on my computer, and I have the latest and greatest of Java installed - none of the others suites have done this.
At is current state, this is not recommended.
Final Notes
This area is in constant evolution with fierce competition among the existing solutions, but there are also new ones popping up. The best and most up-to-date list I know is on Wikipedia, since new solutions add themselves to the lists. There is a list of word processers (that includes a separate list of the online ones) and a list of online spreadsheets.
Next time, I will write about mind-mapping, group management, online meetings, blogs and a few other things. A lot of inspiration for making the online collaboration experience better.
Update: I updated the information about Foldera
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