Editing, revising, and correcting a document online

What is the best way to deal with the editing, revising, correcting, etc. of a document online??

What we have is a select group of less than ten people who want to contribute to the creation of a document and/or documents.

Hence, ideally, each one would be able to edit, revise, correct, add to, adjust, etc. the document(s) online.

Someone introduced the ning.com software, but it does not have the capability for multiple edits by different people.

The phpBB software is nice that it gives you a MAIN PAGE with the listing of all the Forums there, but again in regard to any particular topic, it does not have the capability for multiple edits by different people. (You just post a “reply” to the original poster’s entry … and that is not what we want to do.)

The WIKI software appears to have this capability, but (1) is it possible to establish a “main page” … so that you can see what documents etc. are currently available … , (2) is it possible to restrict participation to our select group of intended participants?

Or is there some better software out there?

Use dropbox.com (referral link). Dropbox.com (general link). Write and edit the document in Word. Share your various versions. So long as no one’s editing it at the same time, you’re laughing. When multiple users are editing at the same time, it will track versions, but I believe you would have to reconcile them.

Dropbox is a terrible idea. As soon as two people start editing at once you’ll get a conflict when the docs try to sync and you’ll lose work.

Also that’s a referral link you’ve hidden there. You get a bonus if someone signs up using that link. Why the deceit?

Hartzel. Use Google Docs. It’s free and will do everything you need.

++

Realtime multi-user editing is now live in Google Docs:

[quote=“Rik”]Dropbox is a terrible idea. As soon as two people start editing at once you’ll get a conflict when the docs try to sync and you’ll lose work.

Also that’s a referral link you’ve hidden there. You get a bonus if someone signs up using that link. Why the deceit?

Hartzel. Use Google Docs. It’s free and will do everything you need.[/quote]No deceit. I referred him to the service. It’s a referral link. (And unlikely to do me any good: I think dropbox is the cat’s ass and have already hit the ceiling on bonus space. Habit.)

A buddy’s using dropbox in his office. Took MONTHS to get him to try it. Now he’s raving about it. Four desktops in the office, a couple at home, couple of laptops: everything works. Google Docs works too, but it’s not as user friendly or reliable as Word. If you have multiple people editing at the same time, the tracking and real time updates are great. If multiple people are editing a doc at the same time, dropbox may be a problem. If not, dropbox is the way to go.

Google Docs? I used it for about a year in an editing team, and it’s horrible. Timeouts, freezing browsers, unexpected logouts, conflicting edits resulting in someone suddenly losing a chunk of work.

I have since moved to Dropbox, which does everything I want, and is completely reliable. I purchased a 50GB account for the laughable cost of US$10 a month.

I use googledocs for everything. Works pretty well for collaborative work.

One assumes there’s no confidentiality/security issues with the documents under discussion, since there’s absolutely none provided by either of these solutions.
I think DBox might have a wee bit of an edge, but freaking Google Docs even says somewhere in the Terms of Use that they retain the right to access all material stored thereon.