Facilitating collaborative work
Many of us work with colleagues overseas or in various parts of South Africa and beyond. TitanPad (http://titanpad.com) provides an application for facilitating this that is independent of operating system. There are several choices, so it is possible to customise to suit different purposes. TitanPad includes a blog. Perhaps the principal use of TitanPad will be for the sharing of documents on which several people wish to coordinate work. The main advantage over other systems, such as GoogleDocs, is that it is set up to allow work in real time. Each member of a group viewing a document will see the document and any changes being made, as they happen. Each person working on the document is assigned a different colour, and their changes are highlighted with the designated colour, and are easy to track; there is a “time-slider” feature so that it is possible to move back and forth through successive stages of the document. Additionally, a “whiteboard” feature allows open discussion with other members of the group — which is useful if several people are trying to develop an idea. At any point, one can download a copy of the document for off-line use. Some users have commented that the need to scroll through long documents to find a set of words is tedious and have asked for a “jump to” feature to be added. Let us hope that the designers (a team of IT professionals located in Austria) listen and continue to develop this useful service.