VENTHEMOSTORGANIZED organization has a hard time keeping track of who is working on which ver¬. sion of which document, and when. Your business may be dealing with the same issues if you've ever heard anyone ask, "Who has the file open? I can't work with it," or, "Don't make any changes to that; I have a version on my laptop at home that's more recent." Or everyone's favorite:
"Oh, you stayed up all night working on that presentation using old sales data. I'm sorry. I have the new figures on my USB memory key."

The solution is to work more closely as a team and track each document throughout its history. Development teams have had ways of tracking the Four W's of the apocalypse (Who? What? Where? When?) for many years, but they have typically relied on complex versioning software. Systems like these have historically been very difficult to set up and use, but the recent wave of the best aspects of these systems to the masses.

. Information workers need to stop working in individual or departmen¬tal silos and share their processes and thoughts. Practically speaking, this means building teams that share and track documents and expertise as they relate to each project. It means getting on board with document collaboration (sometimes referred to by its swankier appellation, enterprise content manage¬ment). The easiest way to get started is to use the features built into Microsoft Office; for better or worse, it's the domi¬nant office app.

The Microsoft Way
Still using Office 2003? It does have some useful collaboration features, such as the Reviewing toolbar (View I Toolbars I Reviewing). Enabling Track Changes will let the app do just that and is a good way to see who changed what in a file (make floating around, you can use Tools I Compare and Merge Doc¬uments to incorporate the changes into a single file. (Yes, team members will still have to communicate before taking data and files off the network to work on them or you'll end up with multiple ver¬sions.) Also, basic, if cu'mbersome, ver¬sion control is built into Word. Go to File I Versions I Save Now to save multiple versions of a document within the same file, but be aware that this will make the file grow quite large.
If you've moved to Office 2007, you've gained real help handling the mechan¬ics of collaborating. Office 2007 takes collaboration up a notch through tight integration with SharePoint Server 2007 and peer-to-peer capabilities. You can now create a document repository on SharePoint and use Groove to bring files off-line (check out), work with them, and then upload them back to the server (check in).

Non-Microsoft Ways
Many server products offer more com¬plete and robust document collaboration features. In addition to Microsoft Share¬Point, Novell Teaming + Conferencing and IBM Lotus Connections let you build team collaboration portals. These are essentially impromptu Web sites you can use to plan and track projects, schedule meetings, assign and track tasks, and manage document collaboration .

Using these portals, you can group documents together so they can be browsed or searched, then checked out, worked on, and checked back in. Differ¬ent versions can be combined, and it's easy to determine who wrote what and when. Desktop sharing, similar to that provided by LiveMeeting (go.pcmag. com/livemeeting) or Web Ex (go.pcmag. com/webexweboffice), is built into many of these products, so if you'd rather work directly with your colleagues on the same document at the same time, you can.