Awhile ago, a friend of mine introduced me to an online program called Writely, which was acquired by Google and is now called Google Docs & Spreadsheets which Google posted about on its blog. Not surprising that Google has integrated its spreadsheet program with a word processing program, but unlike other Google inventions I have found rather annoying, silly or just time wasters, Google Docs & Spreadsheets is a rather productive tool. It makes the sharing of documents so much easier.
Case in point: a friend of mine, who is a genius when it comes to numbers but can't string a sentences together to create a coherent paragraph to save his life, sent me an invite that let me access and edit his paper through a Web browser. I thought, cool! Instead of trading emails back and forth with attachments or comments, or even IMs that get lengthy with discussions and debates, it could all be done in one spot where we both had access and could communicate at the same time.
I've noticed that Google Docs & Spreadsheets has had some upgrades and added some advance features that weren't present when I was editing the paper. I'm very curious to see how quickly people take up this idea of online collaboration. Well, the idea of online collaboration through something other than webinars, online training and the like. Video conferencing I guess is what I'm trying to say.
Is the day when video conferencing and online document collaboration will be fused into one? So you can talk to someone as you edit documents with them online. And would businesses be willing to walk through contract negotiations in such a fashion? Mergers and acquisitions require an awful lot of paperwork and back-and-forth. Would something like Adobe Breeze and Google Docs & Spreadsheets make that easier and more efficient?
Curious. Very curious.
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