- Not only are there better ways to share information,
but there's an ever growing ability to work
together on content.
Many tools give you the ability to work with others
on files simultaneously, some even let you see
exactly who is doing what live as it happens.
Why does this matter?
Well, let me give you a very simple example.
Team X has a status report that they fill out every week,
there are four people on the team
and each one only edits one area of the document.
Now in the good old days, everybody had to wait their turn
to work on the document.
Person number one had to check the document
out of the system so that it would be locked,
otherwise if two people worked on it at the same time,
they could override each other's changes.
The person one needed to make their edits,
then save and check the document back in,
then send a message to person two
that it was their turn, and so on, and so on, and so on.
Even if everything went right, like people remembering
to check their document back in being
a major sticking point, it was a time consuming job.
Welcome to the modern world.
Google was probably the first to fix this.
Google Docs allows for up to 50 people
to be working on a single document all at once,
that's a lot!
You can see how this can speed things up considerably,
if people don't have to wait their turn,
but can just go and do their work when they're ready,
the entire process is going to move much easier.
Office 365 has the same type of functionality,
although not as many people can edit at once.
However, you do get to use the online versions
of the Microsoft Office tools that a lot of people
are already using, and the realtime participation
is very noticeable.
You can quite clearly see exactly who's working in a file
with you and exactly what they're doing
while they are doing it.
You can also have text conversations about the work
while you're engaged in getting it done,
so if you have questions, you can get
them answered immediately.
And by the way, even with live co-editing,
you still have the ability to go back
and check out earlier versions.
If the file gets messed up, you can step back
in time a little to the last good one,
that's a lot better than having to start over from scratch.