Opinions on Collaboration Project(s)

Disclaimer:

I am not sure that this post belongs here. So, mods, if there it is out of place, please do the needful. Thanks.

Problem:

I work in a research center where we are split into groups - not more than 3 - 5 individuals working at the same time on each projects. Generally, there will be overlaps of people with projects. Each group has an "anchor" whose job is to collate and eventually present the findings. Project timelines last anywhere between 2 weeks and 9 months. We generally use Office products - Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access. We also use PDF a lot and quite a bit of our research work involves using Google Earth, Sat images, images in general and Internet search (Google being the default). For our email, we use Gmail (The trend has always been to Gmail's web interface). We are supposed to be using a shared and synched calendar, but I have never seen it work or being used. People tend to use the mobile phone a lot (to make calls and "talk"/ "discuss" things out), which is a real pain.

I am currently embedded in 4 groups/ projects of which I am the anchor in 3. Two of these projects will last over 9 months, while the timelimit of 1 is yet undefined (but it will be longterm).

I am trying to organize my projects and groups for obvious reasons but I am expecting some problems. I have been looking at various options (pre-condition is that it has to be "free") to do this.

With the release of Office 2010 (and Office Web Apps), I am now playing around with either a solution that is MS-centric or Google-centric.

What the planned system (at least how I am thinking of it) would entail?

(1) Email - Gmail is fine. But, I have to get the project members off the web interface and transition to a client. Options here are TB3 or WLM. None of us have Outlook 2007/2010. This is because to do any meaningful work we must have access to our mails offline.

(2) Document sharing - This will involve at least two things. First, it will be necessary to work on documents in realtime and/ or near-realtime. Second, we need to have a document repository where common documents for reference can be stored and retrieved from. Some of these documents should be downloadable by the various project teams (there will be some overlap here). Others should be read-only. In all cases, however, there should be a log to show who accessed which document at what time and did what with it. Documents will range from all kinds of MS files to PDFs etc.

(3) We need to have an integrated bookmark system. Like in the document sharing section, people should be able to retrieve bookmarks, add to them and in certain limited cases to categorize them. An "admin" feature, however, should be able to override the categories actions.

(4) Document fidelity - Since most of the documents we will be generating will be complex - tables, charts, references (footnotes/endnotes) etc - there will be a strict need to maintain how the documents look such that we can print off these directly rather than waste time trying to rejig them just before printing.

(5) Accessibility - We need to be able to access all this stuff not only from our laptops and office-based machines (the latter rarely since we will probably be on the road), but also on our mobile phone. At the very least, changes in documents, updates of documents and calendars etc. should be pushed to our mobile phones either as emails or as text-messages (SMS) in the form of "alerts".

(6) Calendar - This should be project specific and global. Since each of the members of the projects are not limited to a single project, they will have other commitments. These should be reflected in project-specific calendars and in a global calendar to allow for planning and for deadlines. Hopefully, it will also be possible to have the changes made to documents, accessing of the data/ information also reflected in the calendar.

I am sure there are other things that I will need, but this is all I could think of at the moment.

The bottomline is that all this going to have to be free (at least for now) and relatively easy to manage. The question, therefore, is:

What works better? Google or Microsoft's Office and Web Office solution? Or, is there a third option which makes things simpler? How would you advise me to set this thing up?

PS: I am not really a fan of Gmail's "labels" function and their reverse threaded conversation. I think I prefer the "folder" view.

Sorry for this interminably long post and thanks in advance!

 

Considering all points, I think I will opt for Google rather than MS at the moment and I'll have to take chances with the fidelity of the documents, which will have to be fixed later locally, I guess. Or, maybe, just maybe, Google will be able to fix their fidelity issues with MS Office Apps sometime in the very near future.

Any other comments/ observations/ suggestions most welcome.

 

Check this out. This may be a partial (or in due course) a full solution to the Google-MS Office integration problem. Looks neat:

Make Word, PowerPoint and Excel Work Like Google Docs