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Business IT Guide: Sharing documents online

28th Jul 2008
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Work together onlineThis extract is the first of several from the Business IT Guide to alert AccountingWEB members to the range of technology advice available from this government-sponsored site. It outlines the key benefits of sharing and collaborating on documents electronically and points the way steps to implementing a solution.

In a small business a lot of knowledge and expertise is held in the heads of key employees, and these people may be spread across the country. It's increasingly common for people to work from home and meet up every couple of weeks or so. This can present a challenge when a number of you need to work on a document in a co-ordinated way. Simply emailing documents from person to person is a one-way process that increases the number of different versions in circulation and does not support effective collaborative working.

Collaboration sites
The Business IT Guide does not recommend specific products or suppliers, but here is a selection that offer products in this area:
Acrobat.com Adobe site that features Buzzword word processor application, shared screens and online PDFs editing
e-Files - file sharing/storage site offering 6Gb of storage for $99 a year
Google Docs and Spreadsheets - free, online word processor and spreadsheet tools
Microsoft Office Live Workspace - recently launched document store that lets you open and save MS Office files. Microsoft also owns Groove and will incorporate its collaborative features into future releases of Microsoft Office.
NetSharer - Virtual office document store; "Lite" service starts from $30 for 10Mb storage a year
Writeboard.com
Vyew.comOnline conferencing & collaboration site
Zoho - wide range of online applications, all free.

Working together on documents to accommodate everyone’s input can make a real difference to its quality. Once a sales person has visited the client they will need to create a sales proposal with input from commercial, technical and management people. For the person coordinating this effort, using collaborative IT tools will ensure that all the input is intelligently incorporated into the document.

Implementing document sharing and collaboration solutions

At the simplest level, word processing products such as Microsoft Word come with a facility called Track Changes. This command lets you email a document to other people and for them to add comments or changes to the document. When the document is returned to you these changes and comments are highlighted in various colours, enabling you to accept or reject them. This approach will be ideal for many small businesses: the cost is minimal and the feature is built into most office software systems, so the setup time is a matter of minutes.

If you are working on other types of documents and have a need to share documents on a regular basis then there are other products available such as Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server . This provides an advanced way of sharing all types of team based data. Groove is another advanced sharing and collaboration solution with features tailored for the small business wanting to support collaborative working. IBM Workplace Documents is a more advanced solution that lets you share and collaborate securely on documents.

The more advanced products such as Groove and Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server require a reasonable amount of setup and customisation. It may be necessary to invest in a specific hardware server to run the system if you are going to be sharing and swapping large amounts of data (ie using the system on a daily basis). In addition if your business relies on this type of application, you will need to ensure the hardware and software is safe and secure, with appropriate backups in place in case of system failure. This will add to the cost of setup and ongoing support. If you are not a technical person it may be an idea to bring in the services of an outside IT consultant to help you setup and configure the solution. Setup may take 5-10 days.

Security concerns and document sharing and collaboration

As you will be sending documents to other users, including those working from home, you will need to consider the security aspects of your system. For the vast majority of businesses the types of documents being sent are easily secured using the standard security tools available in the software you implement. If you are dealing with more sensitive documents then you may need to consider a more advanced way of protecting your data as it is being sent and stored on different systems. As you will be receiving documents from other colleagues, it is important that they have up to date virus scanning tools implemented on their computers to protect the business from malware. For more details take a look at the Computer Viruses and Malware Guide.

Source: Online sharing of documents
The Business IT Guide enables businesses to make the right IT decisions.

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