Here we come again, with a new release of Agilewords. We love that Agile process built around small iterative developments. It’s so exciting to get frequent updates with new features, better usability, and bugs pushed out of the system- in a matter of days. Don’t you think?

Here’s a video that shows the new Agilewords document view in action.

Let’s start with appetizers. First we added a ‘recently viewed’ document list in the dashboard to simplify access to documents under review. We also improved the look and feel of our quick edit feature to clearly show when you enter in edit mode and how to save content edits.

The hottest course on the menu is, without a doubt, the re-design of our document view. This page is central to Agilewords review application- it’s where users spent most of their time. So we thought it was worth putting some serious effort in to making the review and collaboration experience as smooth as possible.

We made the following improvements:

• New UI with a clear separation between the header and the document pages
• Simplified document header – document title, review status, clear call to actions (‘Review complete’ or ‘I approve’ depending on your task)
• Fixed header – scrolling up and down on the document does not impact the header positioning
• Easy-to-manage document: use icons in the header menu to access the review schedule, list of collaborators, and their tasks. Icon tooltips are coming in the next release

We’re interested to hear what you think. Send us your feedback now!

KillerStartups states that Agilewords provides a “cost-effective way of collaborating” and adds that by “having everybody working on the same file at the same time agreements will be reached far more effectively, and certainly much faster”. You can read the full review there.

So what’s going on at Agilewords? Well, we’ve been really busy working on usability improvements and adding neat features to our document review process and collaboration workflow. Expect to hear more from us really soon…

The Agilewords team

Here are three issues we’ve come across in our business collaboration adventures.

Information Security

Although online collaboration applications are more secure than most traditional means of collaboration (for example, unencrypted email can be intercepted fairly easily), it’s still important to verify your security in the “cloud”. Ensure your collaboration is maintained in a high-quality data center and that your business collaboration solution respects the standard of security your business needs.

Managing Ideas

Team efforts bring individuals and their ideas together. With the right business collaboration tools, you can centralize these ideas for the entire team. Providing a common place for a discussion helps generate innovation and perfectly completes the collaboration chain. Further, a tracking mechanism is important so no idea is overlooked. A web collaboration tool is a perfect choice if you are looking for all these features in a real time manner and with all the benefits of working in a cloud, as a bonus. 

Team Structure

In your company, you can adopt a general collaboration strategy that can be applied and respected for every task. Still, you should take into consideration the fact that roles and responsibility change for each individual and again for each project: authors, editors, and project managers. So, after a proper business analysis, in order to understand the importance of collaboration in your business, you need to clearly define roles. This way, you can keep the individuals focused on their tasks without overlapping efforts. For example, authors might not want editors to modify what they wrote. Instead, they are welcome to make comments and suggestions – you should state that in your workgroup collaboration rules (official or unofficial).

Wikis might appear to provide adequate collaboration. However, every user has the same privileges on the content (Read/Write/Delete). Most companies aren’t very keen on that. So, the corporate collaboration needs a proper structuring, in order to optimize and streamline the collaboration system and get all the benefits from it.

Summary

We’ve experienced these issues before and we’ve developed the solution: Agilewords. Now we’re sharing it with you. Agilewords works to rise above these challenges and ensure business collaboration best practices. Since we’ve just got started, we’re sharing it for free and hope to turn it into one of the most important online collaboration tools. We’d appreciate any feedback you might have.

4. Use structured collaboration

As far as business collaboration goes, I opt for structured collaboration. Wiki’s are great, but not when your team members have different roles. Some might be reviewers, others managers or even authors.

When using an online document collaboration tool with your clients, make sure it allows role-based collaboration. Maybe you don’t want the client to be able to modify everything you’ve written. Or maybe you do! But, to avoid document collaboration errors, you need that option. Not all collaborators are born equal.

5. Make sure you use a secure collaboration system

Whether you have a project with only two contributors, or an entire group working for a complex task, make sure your client collaboration software is a secure one, allowing you to focus only on the results, not on the “leakings”. This is even more important if you also have remote collaboration needs and you need a reliable system to cover them.

6. Consider a web-based collaboration tool

I’m sure you already know the advantages of working in the cloud, so you should put on your list of options an online collaboration solution. The easiest way to see if it is suitable or not for your business is to try first a free web based collaboration tool.
Agilewords is one of the recently launched collaboration tools, aiming to become one of the best. Our application is designed to provide structured, secured and real-time document collaboration. You can try it for free or request a demo.

An efficient collaboration with your clients has some experience-driven rules, in order to obtain successful projects. The client collaboration software plays an important role, so you have to make sure you choose the perfect one for your business needs and requirements.

1. Don’t stuff clients’ inbox with bulky attachments

Nobody is a fan of downloading attachments. Especially when they are zipped. This takes up computer memory space and not to mention time! Even more time when you have to un-archive them. To be frank I find this whole process to be frustrating and time consuming, inefficient for the collaboration management.

You can use an online document collaboration tool to upload documents and just send clients a link. This way you get rid of all the duplicate copies of the original document.

2. Make it easy for clients to provide feedback

If you need feedback from your client, then ideally the document collaboration system you’re using has review features. You have to use a solution that allows clients, once they access the document, to review it and provide you with feedback and suggestions.

3. Request client approval on documents

Keep in mind that your clients are busy. The project they’re collaborating on with you is probably not their only one. So make sure you clearly state what you’re expecting from them when you send them documents. The “task” you’re giving them should be constantly visible on the collaboration workspacer.

It’s harder (read not possible) to do this directly in an email conversation. But if you decided to use central client collaboration software make sure you picked the right one. By this I mean one that has collaboration management feature, allowing you to track progress and administrate the whole process.

There are many collaboration tools out there, Agilewords being one of them. Our application is designed to provide a simple way to get documents reviewed and approved by clients and solve all of the issues mentioned above. You can try it for free or request a demo.

Sharing no longer means email

This point was inspired by David Armano’s blog post in Harvard Business Review. I completely resonate with the points he’s making there (although he is referring more to social sharing). We had a similar blog post on using emails for sharing documents a while ago, insisting more on the business collaborations.

Email, in many ways, has become obsolete, for company collaboration (whether we talk about internal or corporate collaboration) or for customer collaboration. Not only we don’t share news or other mundane things over email – we now have Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc – but we’re relying less and less on email for file sharing collaboration and other sensitive information as well.

We’re moving our sharing towards other specialized collaboration applications, most of which are “in the cloud”. This trend to use web collaboration tools will continue to increase, to the point we won’t be sending (copies of) documents via email at all. Having more than one copy of the original document or too many versions of it is counterproductive.

We’ll focus more and more on keeping documentation in a well-structured and secure centralized location. We will share that location (and login credentials) only with specific users or teams and avoid all that versioning madness – so unproductive especially for workgroup collaboration.

Service unification

Most of us have a Twitter account, a Facebook account, a StumbleUpon account, “the list goes on” account. It’s painstaking to login to every single portal. Social networks aggregators have already started to emerge. I think the focus will switch more to them rather than the original platforms.

A lot of companies are already using social media for business purposes. They might be among the first to adopt these third party apps. This will push the aggregators to include business collaboration tools as well (such as text editors, document review apps, etc.)

Completely move to the cloud

Even Microsoft agrees – according to one of their outreach team members.

We already positioned ourselves on one side of the fence with this one.  As we said before, companies reluctant to adopt cloud technologies will become less competitive and be threatened by new entrants that offer a better and cheaper service.

Business collaboration applications in the cloud can be just as secure (if not more) as desktop apps. They are more intuitive to use and more user friendly. I truly believe they are the future, contributing to business innovation. Even Operating Systems are moving to the cloud!

More remote teams

Cloud computing will eventually lead to workforce globalization. Cultural differences are still an issue here, but I think the trend is to overcome this.

The main idea behind this reasoning is: if we have access to all work-related documents and collaboration applications, from wherever in the world… What’s to stop us from seeking team members from all over the world? This way companies can employ the best talents, wherever they might find it.

We’ve significantly improved the UI, so that you have a plug-and-play experience. We kept the app simple and the features easy and intuitive to find. You don’t need any training to use it. Just open a tab in your browser and get started!

You can upload documents in a click:

Review them:

Invite others to review the docs with you:

Sign-off on them, or send them for approval:

Create separate workspaces for each of your projects, teams or clients:

We improved the features, cut some of them, introduces others. Overall we want to keep it simple and easy to use. But if you have any features that you think would be useful to include, please drop us a line! We’ll certainly appreciate and consider it.

All we can say now is give it a(nother) try!

I absolutely hate this part of the group collaboration.

Does this sound too drastic? Well, it isn’t, really and I prepared all the arguments for this. You can always confirm or deny it, especially if you have arguments too, sustained by experience in group collaboration projects.

My work involves writing a lot of documents (case studies, white papers, market analysis, etc.). Most of which get sent off for approval or review to about 3 other people. This is useful; I get a new perspective over my work and possibly some new ideas. That’s the good part of the collaborative group projects.

The bad part of this deal is that I have to merge all their feedback in the original document in order to create a new version that includes it all. Imagine getting back 3 different versions of what you originally wrote, then taking every paragraph and comparing it with those 3 new versions. The only way that I can characterize this is by being a painstakingly awful process.

Sure, track changes optimize a group collaboration project. At least I know which sentences were modified. The problem comes when you send your documents out to more than 1 collaborator and you meet this situation in most of the group collaboration tasks. Then track changes are fairly useless; especially when each collaborator has its own “better” version of the same paragraph. Then, if/ after you choose one of their suggestions you have to send your work back for review again.

This is where collaborative reviewing solutions come in handy. You only have one version of the document and your co-workers can argue their point of view directly on the side of the document. You will discover even more benefits if you choose a web based collaboration tool. You can define the group roles, get on time review, and be sure that your virtual collaboration has the secure collaboration feature. Of course, the quality of services also depends on the group collaboration software provider you choose to trust. Still, considering all the advantages, what more can a girl ask for?

To figure this out, you don’t need to start a detailed agile analysis. There are a few questions related to agile business process that you can ask yourself:

1. What is your focus?

And by this I mean do you focus on selling more of your current product? Or do you strive to focus on what your customer needs and try to provide it? Any agile approach has the main priority of satisfying the customer and putting his needs and requirements on top of the agile project development.

2. How flexible are you when it comes to change?

An agile business welcomes change no matter how late in the process. It’s all about getting the competitive advantage and being flexible towards change, as part of the agile development process.

3. How tight is your team?

Are your Project Managers and Subject Matter Experts working closely with the rest of the team and respect the agile best practices? Are they involved in every step of the process, on a daily basis?

4. Do you need to constantly check up on your team?

By this I mean do you have people checking up on other people, on a regular basis? If you have to do this, maybe you’re not hiring the right people. You certainly don’t trust them to get the job done. An agile business process is about “building projects around motivated individuals”. Further, compared with iterative development, if you choose the agile life cycle, you shorten the delivery time from months to weeks.

5. How complex is your product/ service?

Remember that simplicity is the key to any agile process. I know it’s a cliché, but there’s brilliance in simplicity, especially if it leads to business process optimization. The more complex a product/ service is the harder it is for users to get around it. Or even figure out what it does – just think of Google Wave.

6. Are you constantly adjusting the way you work?

Same as for the product/ service, the way you work has to constantly develop, respecting an unofficial agile development plan. Your team can continuously develop the way it works, by regularly taking the time to figure out how they can be more efficient and gain all the benefits of an agile business process.

Document revision projects usually involve over 3 people and the steps are always the same:

   1. Elaborate the document.
   2. Send it for review.
   3. Modify it.
   4. Send it for review again. Repeat steps 3 and 4 (endlessly sometimes, as no document is ever perfect).
   5. Send it for approval (to project manager or client).
   6. Publish/ Implement the reviewed document.
   7. Update it if necessary.

We’ll just focus on the document review part for now. Even nowadays, many companies print electronic documents and distribute them to each member of the document revision team. This is a highly ineffective and time consuming process, to say the least, delaying the whole document review process and making the author’s job pretty messy. In order to be truly effective, the document review process should take full advantage of the new document revision technical tools available now.

What a reviewer should look for in a document:

• Form – here’s what makes up for a “good looking” reviewed document:
   Correct spacing
   Correct page numbers
   Accurate headers and footers
   Correct margins and page breaks
• Content
   The material is technically accurate
   The goals of the document have been achieved
   Quality style and grammar (don’t forget that spell check!)
   Document uses consistent tense
   Document addresses the audience appropriately
   Sentences use simple structures
   Unnecessary information is eliminated
   Does the reader leave wanting more?
   Internal cross-reference within the document is accurate
   References to other existing documents are valid

We know that the document revision process can be different, depending on the review requirements of every business. Some steps from the review process described above may be missing or same unnecessary.  We would appreciate your contribution to this list. So, feel free to add your own steps to the process, leave a comment!