Group Project? Use These Collaborative Tools!

With the reinvention of Area 220 [see this post] as a team space on the 2nd Floor of Meyer Library, it's high time we presented some collaborative web tools for use in conjunction with the space [in addition to those mind-blowing whiteboard walls]. And with that, I will also introduce our new blog contributor and Team Leader, Peter, giving us the inside scoop on Drop Box.

Working Together on Google Docs

Google Docs offers everything you'd need for a basic Office suite. The catch is it's all online, so you don't have to empty your wallet for a new copy of Microsoft Word [although Open Office is a fantastic open-source alternative]. You can create word documents, spreadsheet, Powerpoints, and polls that populate a spreadsheet and output graphs. Files can be saved as txt, rtf, pdf, doc, html, and odt, as well as directly printed from Google Docs.

Recently added features include the ability to upload files [limit of 1 GB for all uploaded files] to Google Docs "as is" in addition to converting your documents to the Google Doc format and the ability to organize files into folders.

Oh, and did I mention that it autosaves like you wish you did? That autosave on Google Docs is also unlikely to get lost on your hard drive, and if you have so many Google Docs you can't keep track of them all, Google's search algorithm will find it for you.

That's just scratching the surface of Google Docs. You can share your documents or even entire Google folders with other people simply by emailing them [presuming they have a Gmail account]. There are permissions controlling who can edit or simply view the document, and multiple people can have the same document open and edit it simultaneously as well as watch it update with other peoples' edits. Once in a while you'll "lose" the update battle, but the algorithm is pretty good at preserving everybody's additions. On top of simultaneous editing capabilities, there is also a chat box in the upper right corner by which you can Gchat to one another should you not be in the same room as your collaborators, and when you're the only one looking at the document, you can send them a message under the Share menu.

Google Wave

The lovechild of Google Docs, Gchat, and Gmail, Google Wave is the next generation of Google's suite of collaborative tools. It is currently an invitational-only beta. There are two panes to worry about: the middle one which tracks all your Waves, and the rightmost one which tracks the wave you are currently looking at. The leftmost pane will remind you most of Gmail, and indeed, each wave is like a threaded conversation, only instead of sitting on your email and hitting reply every few minutes, you are part of an IM chat room that is always open. Google Wave is most useful, I think, when at least two people are on so their ideas can interact in real-time, and so I like to call the IMs "thought bubbles."

One of the nice features of Google Wave is "playback," which allows you to recover information or watch the progress of ideas, much like the revision history of Google Docs, but in a slightly more intuitive fashion. The IM chatroom-style organization of Google Docs is also nice because you can see who contributed what and when, so that if you have a question about a revision you know exactly who to ask [or blame]. A nice way to organize a Google Wave is to figure out what you want to produce, make one main "thought bubble" dedicated to it, and chat and edit the main bubble as you go. I've used Google Wave to organize people to plan events and produce documents when our schedules or the weather doesn't allow us to meet in person.

I will remind you that it is in beta, so there are a few bugs and features wanting, but you can offer your feedback in the upper right hand corner. Interested? Find a friend with Google Wave and ask them to invite you!