New features enhance collaboration in Google Docs

When you are working on a document as a team, life gets a lot easier if you can see all the comments from all the key players in a single location. There’s little more frustrating than trying to keep track of the different revisions, only to find out that you’ve made updates to the wrong document.

Google Docs is one of my favorite ways to share documents with my clients and now, it’s even better. Google has rolled out a new feature called Discussions that lets users of its productivity service discuss shared documents in real-time. The upgrade is aimed at helping users resolve issues faster.

You can now hold threaded conversations within a document using time stamps, profile pictures and @mentions. Now you know who said what to whom and can track in a single location.

To keep all the players on top of changes, Google notifies users of new messages via e-mail when they are mentioned in a discussion. This helps keep participants involved in the document . . . rather than going off on side discussions in email.

Discussions is being rolled out to users (you probably already have the capability). Just remember: you have to create a new document to take advantage of it — you cannot apply the feature to old docs.

Filed under: Client Relations, Cloud computing, commentary, Document collaboration, Document collaboration