Evaluating and implementing a collaborative office document system

Collaborative work with office suite documents such as word processing, spreadsheet and presentation files usually demands special tools and methods. For this application, we have developed TellTable, a relatively simple web-based framework built largely from available software and infrastructure. TellTable allows the use of existing office-suite software in a collaborative manner that is controlled but is familiar to users of common single user software. From the literature and our research, we identify twelve challenges to collaborative editing software that we use in an evaluation checklist: time and space, awareness, communication, private and shared work spaces, intellectual property, simultaneity and locking, protection, workflow, security, file format, platform independence, and user benefit. We then use this checklist to characterize TellTable in comparison to some other collaborative office tools.