Writely rocks

So I’m collaborating on a document. Usually this means starting with a word document, saving it as “version 0.1” and forwarding it via email to the collaborator. They do their revisions that come back in multicolours with the option to save or reject and it all gets confusing. What actually happens is multiple versions get saved to the hard drive and it is a really inefficient way of working. My Microsoft friend assures me that Sharepoint elminates the version control aspect of this, but this still means checking the document in and out to do revisions. I’ve tried to use Gforge as a repository and tortoise CVS, but it all gets complicated with plink and putty and I just give up. So what a revalation Writely is. I can collaborate real time on the same document. It has all the commonly used word processing functionality that Word has (keeping styles simple rather than the bloat the MS have added to Word. And at the end we can publish the document to the web, give it an RSS feed or just export it as a Word document. Awesome.