Make Sure Everyone on Your Team Has the Information They Need

In my past I had to manage the sales force of a startup company that was spread over 3 continents. If you worked for a small company and needed to manage information between several locations you know that getting the information from one place to the other and keeping it synchronized can be a a frustrating and a painstaking job.
That is why I want to recommend a very powerful, yet simple, tool that can help you organize the information between different locations effortlessly. And since this tool is free it is perfect for small enterprises and startup companies, even though I used it also in much bigger companies. The tool I'm referring to is the Google Docs web based application.
Google Docs give you the option to use its "Office" like web based applications from anywhere in the world, as long as you have an internet access and a Google account (in case you don't have a Google account, you can open one in a few minutes). The Google Docs applications include a word processing application ("Word" like), a spreadsheets application ("Excel" like), a presentation application ("PowerPoint" like), and a form maker application.
However, to an enterprise that has MS Office, all of the above still doesn't carry an added value. However, the real added value of Google Docs is that it lets you effortlessly corroborate and share your documents with other people.An example can be found in a case where you want to share a potential customer list between all your sales people, so they can see the association of different accounts with each of the sales team members as well as to see if they can help each other with certain accounts. In this case all you have to do is to open an appropriate spreadsheet on Google docs and allow each member of the team to view it. Furthermore, if the circumstances are right you can give authorization to one, few or all members to make changes to the spreadsheet. However, it is important to emphasis that only members that you, as the originator, gave permission to can view or make changes to the document. It is important to clarify that Google docs documents are not open to the public and are private documents.
Moreover, if more then one person are watching the document the system allows them to see who is online watching the document at any given time as well as to see any changes made to the document in real time. Therefore, you can have your sales team, or just the sales manager update the spreadsheet in real time and have all the members see the changes as they occur.
Another example, is where you can have a presentation opened and then have several people working on  it at the same time as they discuss and make the changes in real time. Just think how much time and back and forth of email exchange you can save with this!
Another great feature of Google Docs is that it lets you import other documents already made on your computer with programs such as MS Office to the Google Docs application. Therefore, if you already have a document made with Excel, Word or PowerPoint you can just use the import function and start working on it with Google Docs.
Nonetheless, like almost any other application out here, Google Docs comes with its own faults. Some examples include the limitation on the size of embedded images within documents (currently 2MB) and the limitation on the overall size of a document (currently 1GB). Granted, these faults will not effect most users but they are still there.