Thanks for the heads up from Nancy White at Full Circle OIB – Writely is back! One of my IU group's gave Zohowriter.com a try when it wasn't clear what was happening with Writely after Google gobbled it up, but I found that I prefer the functionality I was excited about the first time I wrote about Writely. Also, we ran into a lot of bugs and errors with Zoho when attempting to set up collaborators. I guess we weren't alone as Writely "outscores" the competition in a recent CNET.com article – against competitors that I have mentioned here (Zoho and ThinkFree) and one I hadn't stumbled upon (Glide). Glad to see that Writely is still free and once again accepting new members! Here is a quick run down of the key features of Writely:
- Multiple Document Creation Options: Create new documents in Writely, upload exisiting documents from desktop (including Word) or e-mail documents into WritelyEdit
- using familiar desktop editing functions (no wiki text) with ability to include tables, links, different fonts, etc.
- Writely's user interface mimics the toolbar interface of common desktop applications
- Tag documents
- Collaboration, Access and Revision Control: Simply enter e-mail addresses of collaborators and they can immediately access and edit in REAL TIME with all collaborators; Control view access based on "publishing" options (to everyone or just a few); Monitor (via RSS), compare and manage revision history (including roll-back to older versions); Track collaborator comments separate from document text
- Export in many formats (including HTML, PDF, Word formats)
- Blog: Create, edit and manage posts with ability to tag documents to mirror blog categories