Analysis and Improvement Proposal of Google Documents as a Groupware Tool

Collaborative applications are getting more and more common in any working environment. Google Docs is one of the most widely used groupware tools, which offer word processor, spreadsheet and presentation tools among other possibilities. Google Documents, as a component of Google Docs, focuses on word processing. In this paper, an analysis of this tool as a collaborative application is performed. The analysis consists of finding out how the tool handles groupware features such as collaboration, cooperation, communication, information sharing, awareness, time and space. Additionally, the analysis has been completed with an experiment which consists of organizing a task to be performed by a number of users in Google Documents. This evaluation suggested some ideas about how to enhance Google Documents to improve collaboration. Starting from the experiment outcomes and the users experience, some improvement have been proposed.