10.3 Aside from allowing others to view your documents, how can you use a Google Docs document collaboratively with others?

There are undoubtedly many ways of sharing ideas. Some of the most common ways of sharing ideas in corporate world is to have meeting where we invite a group of people and the discussion leads to some conclusion how things should look like. These sort of sharing ideas are especially useful for people who are located at the same site or atleast able to login remotely around same time. Here the collaboration is more verbal and not all participants in the meeting may know what the others are saying. Sometimes a copy of a document is send to all intended candidates to review and make comments. The document can be in a word or any text format that can be opened by intended users. This way of sharing documents between multiple users are very useful to extract their opinion and thoughts. However the problem with this approach is that there need to be at least one person who can collaborate with all the users and make updates to the document. Sometimes it is not always possible to capture all the updates that were done in a systematic way. Once the document is updated from all user comments it is sent as a final draft to all the users. While this is a better way of sharing documents to arrive at a common goal, with the change in technology there are other better ways of doing things as well.

One of the leading document collaboration tools that are used these days is called Google docs. The reason why I think this is very useful tool is because the tool is free and it is for everyone who has access to internet. For so many years GOOGLE has been developing vast variety of products that can be found on the internet that includes Gmail, Google maps, Google drive, Google apps, and Google voice and so on. Google Docs is a product by Google and it is free.

One of the best features of Google Docs is collaboration feature. Some of the important features of Google docs include
1. Collaborative reporting
2. Peer editing
3. Collaborative writing.

Using Google docs it is possible to make online edits as and when needed by anyone who is authorized to edit that document. The revision of edits is tracked which allows document to be reverted back to a previous state before and ideas are not lost. This also give a better reasoning why things have turned out to be the way it is now by looking at past historical documents for anyone who joined later to review the document.
Another cool feature of Google docs is it can be shared by knowing the intended users email. This helps a lot of miscommunication like the documents being missed in emails or sending over the wrong version of the document. Here users are notified of any changes so that they can review and make updates if necessary.
Google docs also let users do formatting the documents using colors which are sometimes very important to pinpoint important ideas.
Once the document is ready a copy of URL can be sent across to any users who could also view with read only access.
Reference:
http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en/us/educators/learning_materials/WR_revisingguide.pdf
Also published to web using GOOGE DOCS
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BXwiEOpckcPbHM7ThnthaPb8fJ0Ox9KFT5NNdcjWISs/pub