Online applications

I was suprised to find that I like Zoho better than Google Docs. I guess maybe because Google seems to have the corner on everything nowadays, they'd have the best online collaborative applications, too. Zoho excelled in a couple of areas: It is really easy to invite collaborators and viewers to see your documents. One window, one click of the "ok" button, and that's it. In Google, the user has to invite collaborators and viewers separately. I liked that in Zoho a list of all of your documents appears on the left while you are viewing one. I also like the "switch to" link, which allows you to quickly change to the spreadsheet, presentation maker, wiki, etc.

All of the apps we looked at are useful in one way or another. I wish I would have known about these a couple of years back, when I had this huge collaborative project to do for my Information Retrieval class! I spent so much time adding comments and highlighting changes in a regular old Word document, and emailing attached revised papers to my group mates (the thing ended up being like 38 pages long). Being able to access a shared document online, and having the ability to compare older and newer versions (like on Writeboard) would have been absolutely great!

I uploaded the New Book tracking spreadsheet to both Google Docs and Zoho, plus a couple of word documents (the copyright guidelines for reserves and the opening procedures). Yay!