by Ero Gray-This is one post in a continuing series aimed at nonprofit organizations with limited access to IT staff. The advice and opinions here will tend to be most useful to small and startup nonprofits, which often need to make IT decisions and accomplish IT tasks despite not having qualified folks to help. It should be assumed that all suggestions here are my attempt to recommend the simplest/easiest/most effective options for most offices. Your office may be quite different (or it may not even be an office). Also, as I'll frequently note, IT staff are necessary for any organization to function for long. Links to previous posts in this series follow this post.
A lot of the work you and I do every day involves passing documents back and forth.
The most basic (and common) version involves email. Here's how it usually goes: attach a Word document to an email, send it to a colleague. Colleague changes your meaning and deletes the good parts, then emails back a new version. You open it, read the changes in disbelief, fume for a while, then highlight the things you're angry about and email it back again. Rinse, lather, repeat. The problems here: it's hard to track versions (Word has that 'track changes' feature, but often it causes more problems than it solves) and you wind up with 15 copies of the same document, many of which will all have the same filename. Chaos results, generally a lot of time is wasted.
Within a networked office, you can simply save a file in a shared folder, and tell others where to find it. This works pretty well, as long as everyone closes the file when they're done and no two people are trying to work on it at the same time. In Word, this is a good use for 'track changes' (just be sure to approve all changes and turn track changes off before emailing it to anyone who's not collaborating on it, or you risk everyone who opens the file getting to see your rough drafts-- governments have fallen because of the track changes feature). You'll also want to be sure use Windows' file sharing or file security options to be pretty careful about who has the right to read what: chances are you don't want just anyone to be able to read your payroll documents. (Note that this only works in professional versions of Windows, not home versions).
If you're emailing and/or discussing issues with a group of folks, perhaps not in your office and/or on separate schedules, then Google Groups (or Yahoo Groups, or similar services) allow you to create a discussion, administer who's contributing, have centralized email communications, etc. This doesn't really simplify document
If you're using Google mail, calendaring, or the full Google Apps (as recommended last week), then Google Docs provides an easy way to work collaboratively on documents; just use the Share button to select who gets to work on your document. Google Docs doesn't yet have the sophisticated formatting people expect from Word (though it's getting better rapidly), but it's a great way to work on content. When you're done actually saying what you need to say you can save it as a Word file and touch it up with fonts and charts and whatnot. The Google suite in general offers pretty useful combinations: calendars, Groups, documents, Sites, all with flexible sharing settings. As with most things, the more function you want, the more time you need to spend learning your way around; but it's all relatively accessible to newcomers. And, free.
There are tons of more expensive and/or elaborate ways to collaborate electronically (expensive and/or open source/free), but most of them require an investment in IT staff and/or servers and/or website space. Microsoft Project is a great way to manage timelines and tasks within an internal network. Collaboration applications can mimic Facebook or be forbidding programmer-centric deals with lots of acronyms. Elaborate intranets can be built using free tools like Google Sites, Ning, Wordpress. If you're paying for a hosted Exchange email server, you may choose to also pay for hosted SharePoint, which allows for very complex intranet systems. I'm not currently a big fan of any of these solutions, simply because Google's options are free and easy to use and effective.
It's also worth pointing out that Office2010 apparently is working on a 'cloud' basis, with document collaborating via the internet playing a major role. I haven't paid much attention to this yet but it could turn into something exciting. They're clearly working on explicitly competing with the Google Docs model.
For some deeper research into collaboration, you may wish to read these useful articles on the Idealware website (always a great resource): Comparing Options for Collaboration Software and A Few Good Tools for Sharing Files with Distributed Groups.
Enough about all that for now; next time around let's talk about how to NOT lose your data when something goes terribly wrong. In other words: backups.
We'll cover that next week: IT Without IT, Part 9: Backups
IT Without IT, Part 1: Introduction
IT Without IT, Part 2: Choosing and Acquiring Computers
IT Without IT, Part 3: Operating Systems and Office Software
IT Without IT, Part 4: Antivirus Software
IT Without IT, Part 5: Simple Networking
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