I was going to write a post about why I thought web office (woffice) was (currently) such a waste of time. But then I thought that nobody would listen to what I was saying so that would be a waste of time! Instead then I’m going to write a short post about collaboration. Join in if you like”¦
One of the reason often given as a benefit for using web based apps is the ability to collaborate on documents. I think this is absolute rubbish!!! More over, this is why.
Collaboration, in this context means two things. Firstly the ability for two or more people to work on the same document and sometimes at the same time. Secondly it means shearing documents with people.
Clearly the second is like replacing a paint brush with a roller, take your pick, e-mail, shared drive, x/cloud-drive, on-line docs, it’s horses for course, it’s not a solution to a problems, it another option, don’t you forget it!
The first point is a bit more interesting. I feel that there are a few reasons why this falls apart. Firstly, and this might be me, but the need for two people to be working on the same document at the same time has been in my experience been never! Second I have always found that anything slightly more complex than a shopping list is best managed by one person that is they keep the master and update that. Lets say that I resize a picture on page 3, while Dave is drawing a picture on page 6, now its not going to look right when I finish. Thirdly, and in the words of the small faces, it all or nothing. On line collaborations USP is that there’s just one version of the truth, i.e., you don’t have to manage lots of versions of the same document, but this has implicit weaknesses as well, what if you only want some edits, not all of them?
Then there’s concurrency issues. It’s physically impossible for this type of bi-lateral collaboration to work right. It’s like Groove. I’m Sven from Swiss Cottage, your Peter form Torquay. Hello. I log on to our spreadsheet database, at the same time as you, we both update the same cell, but to different numbers, who wins, who fails, who knows? Erlang that’s who. What about introducing errors when more than one persons is working on the same document, at the same time think about a set of excel formulas no don’t it’s to horrible to consider. And lets not talk about actual fraud!
That’s enough, I could go on, feel free to do so in the comments. Some of these problems are not, of course, unique to woffice, but it sure doesn’t help!
Bar humbug!
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I totally agree Ross, I think version control and accountability are key things they are missing.
While on-line collaboration is often a great waste of time, collaboration via Excel is on a lot of wish lists. Excel is installed almost everywhere. The learning curve is almost 0 for most users. All that is needed to put Excel to use in a collaborative way the add-in Distributed Spreadsheet. No on-line access needed. Full versioning. Full control of all changes. Yes, this is a prop for a product but before Excel gets a bad rep as a sharing tool, there are products available that address the shortcomings of Excel.
IMO these are two different things, i.e. accountability and collaboration. While it may be true that GoogleDocs and online spreadsheets currently lack ways of accountability for changes, they may in the future. If you design them correctly, tools to transfer ownership and accountability for online spreadsheets could resolve that as an issue. As for concurrency, well that is the oldest issue in the book. Just because we software folk might not like dealing with it, it doesn’t mean that users don’t need it.