Lawyer's Guide to Collaboration : Lawyer Collaboration Tools & Technologies : Dennis Kennedy & Tom Mighell : Wiki, Web 2.0, Sharepoint

At its core, Google Docs is really a wiki tool.   It's essentially a web page that anyone with access can edit.  What makes it different from other wikis are the more powerful word processing features, as well as the ability to save your documents to multiple types of formats.

To make sure you don't turn a Google Doc into a wiki that the entire world can edit, it's important to make sure you use the right sharing options.  Wired wrote about it this past week (Google Docs Design Flaw May Fool You Into Making Your Docs Editable by Anyone), and I figured it was worth an explanation over here.   Head over there for the full article, but the gist is this:  when you share a Google Doc with someone, make sure you select the right options so that you don't grant "edit" access to the whole world.  The "Sharing" interface could be a little bit confusing, leading users to unintentionally make their documents visible -- and editable -- by anyone, just like Wikipedia.

The Wired folks say (as do I) that this may not be news to anyone -- but in the event someone reading this blog may get confused when choosing privacy options, we've done our part in passing the message on.

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We're working on creating a big list of tips for collaboration projects, collaboration tools and collaboration technologies. It currently runs about 150 tips.

We'll use the list of tips for handout materials for our upcoming presentations at the ABA TECHSHOW and for some other ideas we have in mind that we'll share later. We'll post the tips you provide as well.

However, since the tips are about collaboration, it only made sense for us to do the list, well, collaboratively, as an experiment in crowdsourcing.

Here's the idea: If you wan to participate, send us your favorite tip or tips (let's try to keep it to a sentence or two each) in one of the following ways:

1. As a comment to this post;

2. Via Twitter to @collabtools, either as a direct tweet (start tweet with DT) or as a reply (start tweet with @collabtools). You can also add a hashtag to the tweet, either #collabtips or #collaboration; or

3.  By email to either denniskennedyblog @ gmail . com or tmighell @ gmail . com.

Please be sure to provide your name, so we can give you attribution.

If you have any questions, let us know.

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Interested in a project management tool, but also want to take advantage of your own firm or company website?  Check out Project Thingy, an interesting tool that embeds itself on your own website.  Just enter your domain name, and you'll get the HTML that you can literally cut and paste on your website to manage your projects.  The data still resides on the Project Thingy servers, but it's an interesting twist to access the project management from your own site.   The service is free for one project, up to $139/month for unlimited projects.

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How secure are your Google Docs?  If you use Gmail, you may recall that a few months ago Google turned on SSL (Secure Socket Layer) encryption -- the protocol that encrypts connections to prevent your email from being hijacked.  So, great -- your email is reasonably safe from hackers.  But what about your Google Docs?  According to ReadWriteWeb in Your Google Docs May Be Open to Hijacking, not if you have a basic account.  If you happen to be using the paid Google Apps Premier or Education editions, you have SSL encryption.  SSL is not, however, an automatic option for users of free Google Docs.

Now that's not entirely true -- if you're a free Google Docs user and you want to encrypt your documents, all you really need to do is type in HTTPS when entering the URL for Google Docs; that will give you an encrypted connection.  Also, according to ReadWriteWeb you can also get a secure connection if you click to other services from the Gmail navigation menu (at the top left of the page).  However, for most of you this probably isn't the best solution.

Again, another reason why, at least for now, Google Docs (the free version, anyway) is not quite ready to permanently store your legal documents. 

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