Riding the Google Wave to better business collaboration

Riding the Google Wave to better business collaboration

We've all played email tennis, either with friends, family or business colleagues. That's fine, if you have the time. If you're working on a proposal document and you're using Word, you can bounce revisions around forever and a day. That's also fine, if you've got the time. Problem is, time is a premium asset these days and if you want to get the most out of your time, you need to save as much of it as possible. And what time you do use, you do so as efficiently as possible — that's where Google's new collaborative communication tool comes in.

Wave is email and revision-aware word processing combined into a real-time web application that allows more than one person to edit the same document at the same time. So imagine starting a new "wave" (which is Google parlance for a new page or document) and then inviting friends to contribute.

Once your colleagues have accepted your invite, you can see them typing in the new wave. Better yet, as you all make additions and changes to each others' copy, you can scrub the revision time line back to a specific point and start again.

The benefits of working with Google Wave are:

• collaborate live with colleagues / clients from anywhere you have an internet connection;
• a complete revision history of all additions and amends throughout the life time of the wave;
• more than one person can edit a wave at the same time;
• you won't have to worry about having the correct version of the software to edit a wave.

Because Wave is free, the only additional time you'll spend will be learning how to use it. And if you can use Word, you can use Wave, too. With all the time you'll save, you could learn to play tennis!

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