The 3 incarnations of collaborative apps

In recent years, there have been an explosion in Web 2.0 tools that aims to greatly enhance your productivity. In this post, we are going to talk about online collaborative tools that educators can utilize to facilitate collaborative/group/project work. Collaboration apps essentially refers to applications that allows people to collaborate. These could include developing a group report, or creating a set of annotated class notes, or simply updating details. On the professional side, educators could also use these tools to develop a lesson plan with colleagues, update minutes of a meeting, or to collaborate on a paper for submission to a journal/conference.The more I look at these, the more i feel these are going to play a major part in shaping the future workplace.

The first incarnation of collaborative tools came in the form of web office suites like Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Zoho & Thinkfree Office Suite.These web office suites allow collaboration in the form of editing of documents, spreadsheets and presentation slides. Zoho, in particular, offers other productivity tools like calendaring functions, notebooks and wikis. This first wave of collaborative tools are particularly useful when there are many authors, and all 3 suites supports versioning. There have already been many reviews done online comparing the web office suites, for example in the readwriteweb and computerworld, so we wont go into it here. The beauty of these web office suites is that anyone with a browser can access them, but this access comes at the cost of functionality. 

While many tout the benefits of cloud computing in general, and web office suites in particular, established companies like Apple and Microsoft have been dabbling into cloud computing in a different way, via iwork-dot-com, and Microsoft Live Workspace. Their flagship office suites have web functionality, but do not exist completely in the cloud, relying on the full-fledged office suite lying in your computer. This is a different mindset from the web office suites, because this treats cloud computing as simply a web extension of  your computer. This is what i like to call the second generation of collaborative tools – software suites which resides mainly in your own computer, but with a web extension. These, of course, have greater functionality than web office suites, and are more powerful, but they are more costly. 

Next, we will talk about what is the third incarnation of collaborative tools, tools like dropbox and syncplicity. These tools allows files on multiple computers to be synced as long as the computers are on-line, and contains a lot more potential than the first or second generation of collaborative tools. In reality, these tools have been around for a while, in the form of Windows Live Sync (formerly known as FolderShare) by Microsoft and Mobile Me by Apple. However, recent tools like dropbox have upped the ante by providing a simple syncing process and at the same time, providing opportunities for collaboration via versioning history and shared/public folders. 

In dropbox, you can share a particular file on your desktop with the rest of the world by dropping it into the Public folder. Any file here will have a particular URL attached to it which can be viewed by anyone. If you are collaborating on a set of documents with a group of people, dropbox allows you to specify your collaborators for a particular folder, and any changes made to that folder will be reflected in your collaborators folders as well, whenever they get online. More importantly, dropbox also stores previous versions of your files, which can be easily restored. Best of all, for the first 2GB of your files, dropbox is free, and it also works on all platforms. Check out a review of dropbox on youtube.