2009/1/29 pmgazz <pmgazz@gmx.co.uk>:
I like Huddle for this kind of thing: http://www.huddle.net/ -- it's online, platform independent, has a collaborative whiteboard and also online document editing (compatible with both OOo and MS Office).
I've used Google Docs (when we signed up, you didn't have to have a Gmail a/c, but you did have to have/create a google account. They didn't make it overly clear that you could have a non-gmail email address, though. I do agree about the security issues, and wouldn't use it for anything that had to remain secure - but to quickly co-author things I've found it v. useful. It seems to refresh reasonably often - and you can manually refresh it. I've not seen the chat feature that has been mentioned - only seen it in Google Spreadsheets - but I've not used G Docs for a while now. Has anyone actually got an Etherpad a/c? This conversation reminded me & I went to the site. Apparently I asked for a beta account 62 days ago. I've not had it as far as I know. (Anyway - it said "you requested one" ... rather than "we sent you one") I've just signed up for Huddle - that looks good! In the past, I've also use Zoho - which I think I prefer to Google Docs, though it still has the updating issue - you have to wait a bit, it's not instant. However, any of them are much more "instant" than emailing docs round groups! Emma -- Emma Duke-Williams: School of Computing/ Faculty eLearning Co-ordinator, University of Portsmouth, UK. Blog: http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/