[ale] collaborative work environment

[Greg Freemyer]

On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 10:22 AM, John Scott <John.Scott at peak10.com> wrote:
>> Confluence is a lie. We use it at my company and it doesn't deliver on
>> the promise.
>
> OK... I stand corrected.  I had just used Jira in the past.  I had no idea that confluence was a PoS.  My opinion is that Jira is not a PoS.
>
>> I would suggest Google docs.
>
> Agreed on google docs being simple; however, with Google "all your data R belong to us".  Depends on the project for my taste as to whether I want my data sitting out there on Google docs.
>
> -John

I'm an occasional Google Docs Spreadsheet user.

I'm under the _impression_ that if you pay the $50/yr/user google apps
fee, then they don't information mine your data.  (Admittedly, I never
paid and used the free service instead).

If true, that's not a bad cost for supporting geographically spread
out project like the one under discussion and knowing that prying eyes
aren't sucking in your data.

Google Apps does not "lock" documents, nor use a check-out / check-in concept.

Instead when the process is smooth, all users are working on the live
doc and edits get reflected between the parties within seconds.  I've
used a google docs spreadsheet as a feature tracker for software where
people were in Atlanta / Detroit / Newark.  It worked well even with 5
people on a conf call and several of us making edits in different
cells simultaneously.

Clearly you need to be careful moving rows around.

But if the process is not so smooth such as when the Internet is slow,
you need to ensure just one of the 5 people viewing is working on a
given area at a time.

When the process is really bad, it's painful for even one user, but I
last saw it that bad about 3 years ago.

Greg