Question

I am working with a small team (2 others) of developers that are geographically dispersed, and I’m looking for good ways for us to collaborate on specs… We’re thinking we might use Google Docs to write the spec in so we can all have access to modify it in a central location.

What have you done? What good ideas do you have?

Answer 1

If you have an intranet or VPN, I would actually consider installing and using a small Wiki for these specs.

Compared to Google docs you get:

1. Much better versioning and change tracking (IMHO)
2. Much easier to start new documents for subsections
3. An actual markup rather than WYSIWYG (a matter of taste, I prefer LaTeX to Word).
4. Possible to attach variety of other file types
5. Very easy to backup
6. Very easy to create an offline version
7. You don’t have to worry about storing sensitive materials elsewhere.

The disadvantage is that it is not WYSIWYG, which may or may not be an issue to you.

Of course, you can pick a Wiki implementation that supports a better editor, and possibly even a synchronous collaboration one.