At Emily Chang's eHub, I saw a link pointing to Writely. The basic concept of Writely is simple, and well-realized: a web-based repository of documents, each of which can be shared with other collaborators.

The documents themselves support various rich text elements, like styled text, tables, images, and so on. Every edit session is saved as a separate timestamped version, and you can open earlier versions, see what changes have been made by collaborators, and even revert to earlier versions. You can export the docs as RTF and Word formats. You can publish docs to make them accessible to specific users or to the public. Docs can be tagged, and each tag can then be used to select the corresponding subset of documents.

I encountered a small number of annoyances in the user interface -- the folks behind Writely didn't test on a Mac with Firefox, apparently -- so various elements that were highlighted wound up being impossible to see. They say they are working on a fix. Doesn't work at all on Safari. A "note" capability -- more or less a post-it that gets placed on the doc -- is in alpha, and really needs to be rejiggered to be more like a Word comment. I also can't get the RSS feed from my account to be accepted by NetVibes as valid. But otherwise the features form a great starting point for what is likely to become an instant success.

What I like about Writely is the web-centric model: the docs reside in the system, and (aside from the occasional exported doc) everything is off the desktop. The endless problems of passing docs around as email attachments are completely avoided. And the ability to push docs from a private, collaborative development to a published version for a larger group, and the then fully public. This is the usual lifecycle of many documents, like press releases, for example.

What is missing? I would like to be able to save comments with doc versions, so that collaborators could summarize changes. Other, more sophisticated capabilities -- like document templates, page headers and footers, and other page layout -- would really round out the document capabilities.

But I have switched over. I intend to use Writely aggressively -- partially to get away from the document clutter on my desktop, and partially to make all the Corante corporate docs I manage accessible to my partners.