Google Writely is cool

I've tried many different tools and services in the past to better how I collaborate on documents with others.  I've tried NetMeeting, LiveMeeting, and even OneNote in collaboration mode.  All had some very good promises - all have let me down mostly because of the reliance of either screen capture technology ("no, let me take control of the app now..") or just poor performance...

... and then along comes Writely.  My first test was with Mike Diehl just to see how it would work.  I'm in the process of writing a book on Team System right now and thought that I could use the book outline as a starting ground.  I sign in to Writely, upload the document (very fast) and I was off to the races.  Of course, Writely isn't as full featured as Word (you can't really expect that) - however, it provided more features than I expected.  One of my favorite features is collaboration.   I was able to invite Mike to work on the outline with me and we had no problems working on the contents of the document at the exact same time - writely saving every couple of seconds, merging Mike's changes with mine.  It worked like a charm and I was very impressed at its performance and its overall usefulness.  Since then I've used it a few other times to collaborate on Word documents with others.  No hassles around checking things in/out - taking control of applications, lag time, overall performance - it just works.  Funny, I also had no problems exporting to PDF as well as OpenOffice - go figure.

Give it a try... www.writely.com