CPD23: Week 9 - Google Docs, Wikis and Dropbox

Google Docs has the all basic capabilities needed by the average home user and the price (free!) is tough to beat. The business version is very reasonable at $50/year. For home & small business users, the calendar & email is excellent and can be synched with Microsoft Outlook. Unfortunately, the wordprocessing, spreadsheet and other apps require an active internet connection to be of any use. For a mobile user in NE, that really limits this product in my opinon. The document sharing features are  nice, but I don't think I would use the sharing enough to want to give up  the ability to create and work on docs offline. If you don't want to pay the big $ for Microsoft Office, try OpenOffice. I'm a power user of Excel and Google's spreadsheet app doesn't support a lot features I use in Excel.

Dropbox is probably one of the easiest to use online document storage services out there. It is also a great way to share docs with others. You only get 2GB of storage for free, but that should be plenty of space to hold a few docs you want to collaberate with others on. It's also a great way to have an online backup of your important files as long as you can afford to pay for the amount of storage space you need. If online backup is all you want, check out Carbonite.

I love Wikipedia. I use it all the time. I had not thought of using wikis as a collaberation tool. I had always just considered them as a one-way tool to push information out there. I now see where setting up a wiki a team can update together would be very useful. Loved the camping trip video example.