Online Productivity Tools

As I've mentioned before in my "Google" post, I use a shared Google calendar daily that my fiancee and I use to make sure we both know everything that is going on (particularly important when wedding planning!!). 

However, I'm a bit less certain about Google documents.  I can see the desire to replace things like Microsoft Office products (because they are so expensive).  However, they allow companies in particular to have a great deal of control over their own documents.  Google docs opens that up a bit and allows people to share documents, open them up to others, etc. which I can see some companies being uncomfortable with.  This is the reason that I think Microsoft Office is still the number one in document management programs.

We did experiment with Userful (an open source documents software package) on the 4th Floor for customers.  Problems really came about because of formatting.  People would open their resume up from a disc/usb key, etc, and the formatting that was in Word was lost.  This meant that they had to reformat it - and then they couldn't open that version up on anything that didn't have userful as a platform. 

Google docs is different in that it's all available online. However, until companies decide to get on the bandwagon - I think we'll be stuck with Microsoft Office.  Guess we will see. 

Until then, I have been using Dropbox (at Dropbox.com) that allows me to share files among multiple computers.  Things like our wedding RSVP and to-do list.  My fiancee can access it from work, and his home PC and I can access it from whatever computer I am on.  It all just stays on the Dropbox server.   Kind of cool.  I also use Box.net which is a place to store files for our Condo board.  Lots of options out there.