Working with global team? Well, one of the issues that you might be facing is collaborating across geographical locations and keeping your document updated with each and every individual’s feedback/comment.
Being a Product Manager, I face major issues while collaborating across multiple teams (especially technically-challenged marketing and sales). I can’t really afford to have a version control system for each and every file that I am working on. There are few files/documents which need a number of iterations (across different teams), before being published to a version control system (CVS/VSS etc.)
And that’s where Live Documents (from the factory of Sabeer Bhatiya’s InstaColl) comes as a great useful tool.
How does Live Document work?
- You need to install the plugin.
- The software will install a toolbar on MS word and excel (other MS office application are on roadmap, I believe).
- To share the file with your contacts, enter their email id and permission level (read/write/)
- Your contacts will receive a mail and instructions to install the Live Documents plugin.(yeah, sounds a little old-school types, but that’s the way it is!).
Unlike Microsoft’s Sharepoint, Live Documents does not require a centralized place to store documents – there is no need to upload/download files .
I think this is one of the best product coming out of InstaColl’s factory. Apart from the neat UI, Live does simplify a very very significant problem of collaboration. It fills a very important gap between unaffordable Sharepoint and Feature-poor wikis/other collaboration tools.
It would be great to have other MS products like visio etc. supported by the product.
As far as pricing is concerned, beta version is a free download – but I suspect that Live will not be free once it comes out of beta . 
But I do have concerns regarding the usage. For e.g. I am not too sure whether this application will be able to merge concurrent changes from different users? Any ideas?
Also see: My review of Blog Everywhere| InstaColl Blog
Filed Under: Live Documents,InstaColl
Hey Sinha
.
I know this is a pretty late comment on this post
Peer to Peer collaboration is an intersting idea and Live documents is not the first one to attempt it. Microsoft Office Groove(or whatever the official name is) uses a similar approach. In my mind this approach works great for collaborating while creating a document. This doesnt necessarily help in discoverability. This is where the centralized repositiory wins out or atleast provides ease of use. The other problem these approaches dont necessarily solve but are important from IT persepective is backup scenarios and records management.
Disclaimer: I work on sharepoint so I have my biases.
-Puneet Narula(Yes you do know me:-)
Hey Narula!!
Whats up dude!
Well, I agree that P2P collaboration isn’t an alternative in professional environment. But look at SME/SMBs, they can’t really afford a solution like sharepoint and the only option left is to merge changes manually.
P2P collab is definitely not for bigger orgs/teams, but works well with smaller teams. Infact, I won’t be surprised if InstaColl guys integrate Live Docs with Google docs, since they both are targeted to similar industries.
WSS is free and most SMB/SME’s will have all what they care about in it especially related to document management. There are also hosted sharepoint solutions available for them which are cost effective as well as do not require the big IT staff on board.
Pingback: Online collaboration made easy with web whiteboard | pluGGd.in
Pingback: Live Documents - New wine in the old bottle |Indian startups, India Business
It crashes in IE.