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Google Docs offer great tools to support collaborative online work and are part of an explosion of webware applications. While the tools are straightforward and basically easy to use, collaboration and effective group work require special skills, especially on long, complex projects.

Brian A. Connery and John L.Vohs wrote the booklet Group Work and Collaborative Writing for UC Davis undergraduates to help them succeed in working on group projects. Although the advise isn't specifically designed for web-based collaboration tools like Google Docs, their do's and don'ts for a good group, discussion of roles within groups, and look at problem-solving as an integral part of group work are important concepts in virtual collaboration.

Now that you have played with Google Docs, are you also interested in exploring the new Microsoft Live Office Workspace? Sarah Perez wrote on the Read Write Web a posting entitled Live Office Workspace vs Google Docs: Feature-by-Feature Comparison where she looks at the basic features of these two services. Included in her comparisons are file size limits, number of viewers supported for shared documents, and other useful information.

Policies play an important role when content is available on the open Web. Shirley Waterhouse and Rodney Rodgers in an article entitled "The Importance of Policies in E-Learning Instruction" (EDUCAUSE Quarterly, Number 3, 2004) talks about the value of policies on topics including privacy, email, electronic discussions, and intellectual property rights in e-learning, which are also important in collaborative online work.